The Hole (28 page)

Elliot shook his head. He didn’t understand.

“The children,” she said. “Is that what they all became?”

Elliot sat down next to her. His head was clearing. “Could be.”

“Jesus,” she said. “You think it gets worse now? On the other side of the barrier? You think the barrier keeps things like that in?”

Elliot shrugged, and remember the glasses in his pocket. He pulled them out and, holding them up to his face, stared through.

“What’s that?” Evajean said.

“What I found inside, in the basement. Is it what you sent me down there for?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No,” Elliot said. “No, that’s unfair. It’s not your fault. Goddamn, how could
anyone
have known that thing was in there?”

“What thing?”

Elliot realized she didn’t know. She’d only seen the children as he came up the stairs and when they both ran out the back of the house.

“It was in the basement. I can’t really describe it, Evajean, but it was like the master of those kids. They were its servants, helping it.”

Evajean blinked, her face pale. “What was it? Was it another of those creatures that killed Melvin?”

“No.”

“What was it?”

Elliot shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was terrible. This
thing
, coming at me, moving across the floor- But I don’t know how it was moving, because it didn’t seem to have any arms or legs or- or features, even.”

“But you got out,” Evajean said. “I’m so sorry for sending you down there.”

“I found these,” Elliot said and held up the glasses.

Evajean took them and looked through the lenses. “It’s just blurry,” she said. She put them down. “They’ll have a use later, though, I know it.”

“So we find a car,” Elliot said, “and we drive to Salt Lake City. We get there and track down this museum or whatever it is and we somehow use these things.”

“Yeah,” Evajean said.

“And we do this because Melvin read in that book that we’re supposed to, that we have to stop Moroni from doing something. Taking over the world, I suppose.”

“The Mad King.”

“What?”

“That’s what Melvin called him. Moroni. He called him the Mad King.”

Elliot continued. “And we do all this not just because Melvin read it to us in that book but because we both know-somehow know-that it’s what we have to do. Everything’s-”

“For a purpose,” Evajean said. “Like finding the waypoints.”

Elliot nodded. “But how’d we get this purpose? Who gave it to us?”

“I don’t know,” Evajean said.

“Honestly, I’d be inclined to think it was all shit, brought on by stress from what we’ve been through. Not all of it, of course. Stress wouldn’t explain the crazies or the creatures or what I saw in that house. I couldn’t possibly explain all that. But it’d be awfully nice to think the rest-this quest, this purpose-was only our brains trying to make sense of things, like a mass delusion. Except I can’t, because of what-”

“Because of what happened in Nahom,” Evajean finished. “Because you saw me-” She stopped.

“Because of that,” Elliot said.

“I think what I really want,” Evajean said, “is to know. Before this ends, I want to know all of it. Whatever chose us owes us that, at least.”

Elliot stood up and wiped his palms off on his pants. “Then let’s go find the answers. At least now we know where we’re going and there doesn’t look to be anything in our way.”

Evajean pushed herself to her feet. “Right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They walked in a direction they thought would take them to the road. Hope chased along behind.

Finding a car proved easy.

“This is where they all came,” Evajean said, looking out over the rows of vehicles along the sides of the road. All pointed west.

“To Salt Lake City,” Elliot said.

“You think so?”

“Where else? It’s where we’re supposed to go, too.”

“Yeah,” Evajean said, “That makes about as much sense as anything, I guess.”

“Then let’s grab a car that runs and get going. I don’t know how far it is and I want to find something to eat.”

And so they walked along the highway, on opposite sides, checking doors and then, if a car proved unlocked, leaning in to see if the keys were still in it. Hope bounced along behind, lending his help by sniffing around undercarriages and between tires.

It took forty-five minutes for their search to bear fruit. “I found one!” Evajean called and Elliot turned to see her waving from the window of a Subaru Outback, a filthy car with a cracked rear window and rust climbing the side panels.

“Must not have thought it was worth even locking,” he said and walked over to her. “Did you try the engine?” he asked.

“No,” Evajean said. “I wanted to wait for you to get here, for good luck.”

“Oh.” He stuck his head through the window. “It smells.”

Evajean clapped her hands, rubbed them together, then grabbed the key and turned. The engine kicked and sputtered, but then ran, and Elliot grinned at the black smoke that burst from the car’s tailpipe. He got in. “You’re going to drive?”

She nodded. “You did all of it before. This one’s automatic.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “You still have the map?”

She pulled it out of her jacket pocket and handed it to him. Elliot studied the lines of roads, tracing outward from where Melvin had marked the house. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not terribly far.”

“And we just follow this road?”

“It looks like.”

“It’s what everyone else was doing,” she said.

They drove. Neither was worried about running out of gas, because the twin columns of abandoned vehicles stayed with them, stretching endlessly east and west. A couple hours later they passed signs for a truck stop town. Only a few minutes along its main street had them at a small grocery store.

The place looked like it hadn’t been touched, hadn’t been raided or looted in the aftermath of the plague. The shelves were still full of food in boxes and cans, though the produce had rotted entirely and the smell forced them to keep their shopping expedition short.

Back in the car, stuffing themselves with breakfast cereal and hard cheese, canned fruit and chocolate bars, Elliot felt himself finally relax.
Whatever’s there
, he thought,
whatever we have to deal with in Salt Lake City, we’ll manage.
The images of the thing in the house had left him, though he felt safe assuming they’d make a return when he slept.

Hope wolfed a can of dog food and Evajean giggled at the dog’s enthusiasm.

After eating, they stocked the car with supplies, syphoned fuel from broken down pickup truck to fill the Subaru’s tank, and headed back out onto the freeway. Elliot fell asleep within minutes, happy to let Evajean make up for all his driving driving time. Hope wedged himself between Elliot and the console and snored.

Evajean shook him away some time later. “We’re here,” she said when he sat up.

“Sale Lake?” He was groggy but refreshed to a degree he hadn’t been since before they’d left Charlottesville.

“Yeah.” She pointed. “We passed signs a while ago and now, there it is.”

Elliot looked. He could just make out the bulge of a skyline in the desert. “I slept a while,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I really long while. But Elliot? Now that we’re almost there, I don’t know what’s next. What’s supposed to happen?”

He shook his head. “We’ll drive the rest of the way in, see what’s there.”

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said.

But they didn’t drive the rest of the way in. Ten miles from the city, both Elliot and Evajean feeling nervous at what might be ahead, they saw the first crazy. A young woman, in designer jeans and an olive hoodie, marched along the side of the road toward Salt Lake. At the sound of their car, she turned and Elliot caught the expected twitching of her mouth as she mumbled persistently to herself.

As they got close, the woman leaned out at them, reaching with her hands, but then they were past and she waved her arms and screamed.

“Damn,” Elliot said. “I was hoping-”

“You think there’ll be more?”

“Probably.”

And there were. A quarter mile further along the road was a teenage girl in a prom dress and then an old man stumbling as he pushed a metal walker across the asphalt. The crazies only grew thicker the closer Elliot and Evajean go to the city, until they were forced to take an exit off the highway and into an industrial park. The side road-and the park, from the look of things-seemed free of them, fortunately.

“Getting into the city’s going to be difficult,” Elliot said as Evajean pulled the car into a parking lot.

“They’re only on the roads, it looks like,” Evajean said.

“We’ll stay off them, then. Walk in if we need to.”

“Yeah,” Evajean said. Then, “We’ll have to leave Hope here.”

She was right. They couldn’t trust the dog not to give them away. “I’ll leave him food,” she said, “and a ton of water. He’ll be fine until we get back. We can lock him in one of these buildings, like a trailer or something.”

“Okay,” Elliot said, convinced they’d never see the dog again. “There’s one over there.”

Once Hope was secured in the trailer, with piles of food and water poured into every container they could find, they took water bottles for themselves and stuffed them, along with food, into a couple of canvas bags they’d taken from the grocery store. Elliot wished they had backpacks, but carrying even these heavy sacks was better than going thirsty. And they could dump them, too, if it proved easy to find water in the city.

They waited with Hope in the trailer until dusk came, preferring to make their journey into the city masked by darkness. During that time, they neither heard nor saw any sign of the crazies.

Elliot opened the trailer’s door and stepped out. Night’s chill had come quickly and he pulled his jacket tighter around himself. “It’s clear,” he said to Evajean.

She stepped up behind them, then bent down to hug Hope. “You gotta stay here,” she said to the dog. “We’ll be back, I promise, but you need to stay here.” Hope shoved his head against her hands, but she pushed him back. “Stay.” She pulled the door closed. The dog scratched at the inside of it for a few seconds, but then they heard him wander off into the back of the trailer.

“He’ll be fine,” Elliot said.

“Yeah,” Evajean said.

The walked through the industrial park, between buildings and along fences, toward the city. No lights guided their way, though they could make out the skyline against the clouds and moon. They found a road that lead to the core of the city and followed it. Only once did they see any crazies, and those were some distance away, a pack of half a dozen wandering in circles.

“It’s like they’re
more
crazy here,” Evajean whispered.

She was right. All the crazies they’d met outside of the barrier bordered on not being crazy at all, but in here they seemed dazed and lost, like they truly had gone mad.

“You think it’s because we’re closer- That we’re getting near something that’s making them that way?”

Elliot shrugged. “Could be. Things feel different here.” And they did. The air was cold and carried a tension, like electrical lines were nearby, and Elliot could taste something in it, burnt and musty. Both grew faintly stronger as they walked.

“There’s going to be a lot of them, when we get into the city,” Elliot said. “All those cars, and the ones we saw along the freeway-they’re all going to the city.
All
of them, all of the crazies and all of the people who are missing.”

“I wondered that,” she said. “How empty the world was, except for Nahom. And the cars gone, too. It’s like everyone just packed up and came here.”

“That’s not going to make getting around the city very easy. It may be pretty dangerous to find this museum.”

“I think we’ll be okay,” Evajean said. “We’re supposed to find it, remember? And the crazies may be on our side, like the ones in the warehouse.”

Elliot nodded. He still thought of them as the enemy and couldn’t shake that impression, not after what happened in Nahom.

“Still,” he said, “we should be careful.”

“Absolutely,” Evajean said.

They walked in silence then, feeling the change in the air and the weight of the sacks of water.

They’d gone a half an hour into the suburbs when they saw the woman. A group of crazies had wandered by, walking down the middle of the street and scanning the houses. Elliot and Evajean crouched behind a wooden fence, staying out of sight. The crazies talked to each other in their strange language as they passed. When the pack had gone, Elliot stood up. “It’s only going to get worse,” he said, “the deeper into the city we get.”

“Just means more being careful,” Evajean said. “I guess it’s good we don’t have Hope with us.”

They were picking up their bags to continue walking when they heard the snap of branches behind them. Elliot spun, looking into the shrubs that lined the fence at the back of the house’s yard. Evajean jumped up, dropping her bag. “What was-”

“Quiet,” he said. The noise had definitely come from back there. Someone was in the bushes. For the first time since they’d made it through the barrier, he found himself wishing he hadn’t dropped the gun on the floor in that terrible basement.

He lifted a water bottle, hoping its weight would lend force to any blow he might need to make. “Elliot,” Evajean whispered, but he ignored her.

He started across the yard, keeping low. He’d gone half way when the woman fell out from behind a bush and ran toward him.

“Could it be?” she called. “The Mighty and Strong?” She stopped when she saw the bottle in Elliot’s raised hand. “Please.” She was panting. “I don’t want to hurt you. Oh, I’ve waited so long.”

Evajean came up behind Elliot and put her hand on his arm. “I think she’s one of them,” she said to him.

He let the bottle drop. “One of who?”

“Like Melvin. She’s supposed to help us.”

Elliot held onto the bottle. He wasn’t up for trusting anyone just yet. “We’re- I guess we’re the Might and Strong,” he said.