Page 36 of Them

The third truck was just right. It was a U-Haul, and a big one at that. The cargo latch was guarded by a heavy padlock, but the man found the key in one of the cupholders inside the unlocked cab. This time, when he pulled open the cargo doors, the man was met with only pleasant aromas. Fresh linens. Laundry detergent. Varnish. Familiar traces of a time before. They’d faded, of course, but were present all the same.

It was a moving truck. A family’s worth of possessions crammed into thirty-some feet of cargo. Most of it was boxed up or covered, but there were three bare mattresses stacked alongside one another. The man waded in and tipped the mattresses back onto the clutter. He then dusted off the one on top, cleared away a few odd trinkets that had spilled from boxes, and almost immediately passed out. There were no dreams, at least none that he remembered.

The next night, after a Bic-lit breakfast of nuts and canned peaches inside the cab of the U-Haul, the man continued north. Two or three miles up the interstate, he noticed a change in the abandoned cars. More of them were piled up on the shoulders, as if they’d tried to go around something blocking their way. Meanwhile, the four-lane, bumper-to-bumper traffic wasn’t nearly as orderly as before. It looked like everyone had panicked. There were cars and trucks all over the place, facing in every possible direction, some even resting at the bottom of the grassy hill beyond the narrow shoulder. As if they’d all tried to scatter at the same time. The road was surprisingly clear in some places and totally logjammed in others. Nearly every vehicle was damaged in one way or another. Some of the fuel tanks had even blown, the surrounding asphalt singed with a sickly gray.

Up ahead, a passenger bus was toppled onto its side like a Hot Wheels miniature on a child’s bedroom floor. On the opposite side of the highway was a similarly impenetrable wall of wreckage in the form of a flipped-over semi, mirroring the violent pileups on either shoulder.

He approached the underbelly of the overturned bus, a jagged wall of rusting tanks and axles. A nearby sedan, its bumper crumpled against the massive wreck, served as the perfect stepladder. The man climbed onto its hood, grabbed hold of the tire floating a few feet above him, and hoisted himself up onto the bus’s side.

As he got to his feet atop the twisted metal and broken glass, the man realized what had become of the passenger vehicle. Beginning at the first window and tearing across the entire length of the bus was a deep gouge. From the high ground, he saw the same ragged tear on the moonward face of the trailer on the other side of the highway. His stomach roiled. These were no random accidents spurred on by panic. This was an ambush. This was them.

The highway beyond the pileups confirmed his suspicions. It was a wasteland, a brutal testament to humanity’s futility in the face of a new world order. Military vehicles, tanks and helicopters and Humvees, sat dull and broken. If the bus was a child’s forgotten toy, then the scene ahead was one perfected by a dog left home alone for too long; the entire landscape appeared chewed up, torn open, and spit out. Craters speckled the debris. The nearby woods had been broken and burned… bombed. Matchstick trees stared at him, their branches still blackened and bare.

The carnage stretched as far as he could see in the vast moonlight. The man, abandoning the high ground, leapt down and landed on the highway with a gravelly crunk. He bent over and picked up a chunk of torn asphalt, tossed it back and forth in his hands like a baseball before dropping it again. His mind worked to pick up the pieces: Abandoned cars there, a war zone here, gashes on the bus.

These people were evacuating, and the Scorpions ambushed them. Went for the two biggest vehicles they could find and brought them down as blockades, trapping everyone else. Is that why most of the people farther south made a run for it? Was the military buying them time? Counterattacking? Were they able to clear out the others?

It doesn’t really matter, though, does it? The only story left has been lost in the dust.

He walked on through the wreckage, treading carefully over the buckling asphalt. It wasn’t just the military that had been caught in the chaos. There were passenger and emergency service vehicles everywhere. Limos and lemons alike.

The man steered near the wooded shoulder to avoid a downed helicopter, whose rotor was bent at such a precarious angle that it looked as if it could guillotine toward the ground at any moment. Painted on the chopper’s side, he could just make out the familiar insignia of the Red Cross.

Farther down the hill, amid the tree line, the man could see even more cars. Moonlight sifted through the screen of foliage, spotlighting several vehicles that had been dragged away into the forest and dissected like helpless bugs.

After two or three more miles, the battlefield finally began to disperse. The craters and shattered earth slowly shifted back to a more familiar landscape. Highways and lush forest. Fewer cars, most of them unmarred. The carnage behind him wasn’t even a thumbnail on a map. A blip of destruction. An insignificant instance of obliteration. One of a billion.

The woods thinned and gradually broke, revealing a sprawling farm running alongside the highway. In the middle of an endless field sat a downed fighter plane covered in vines. It was too dark to see if the pilot had survived.

Every few miles, the man checked the highway signs with a flicker of his flashlight to make sure he was still traveling I-95 NORTH TO RICHMOND. For the first time in a long while, the idea of getting lost was frightening. He checked his watch with an obsessive regularity, careful to allow himself enough darkness to find a house off the highway, a safe place to rest. Not even forty-eight hours separated him from the cozy confines of the basement bedroom, and already he missed the comfort and security of four walls and a bed frame.

After cutting across the loose gravel shoulder and making his way through an overgrown vineyard, he broke the back window of the nearest house and let himself inside, nicking his elbow on a shard of splintered glass. With a dinner of canned beans and corn fresh in his belly, he slept on the living room sofa from six in the morning until four in the afternoon. The handful of hours between waking and nightfall were spent listening to the radio and hunched over the map in flickering candlelight. He snacked on salted nuts as he plotted his course through Richmond and Fredericksburg and on into the capital city.

Feeling rested, he left just after sunset and, after two hours of walking, arrived in Richmond by way of the interstate. Progress had been slowed by bumper-to-bumper columns of abandoned cars and trucks. Errant clusters of pileups. There were no stars out tonight, the sky choked with clouds, offering only fleeting glimpses of a suffocated moon. With the James River directly ahead, the flashlight was too risky, so he was forced to maneuver by touch and intermittent Bic-light. It was far from comfortable, but he had scant other choice.

After a while, the metal guardrail bordering the shoulder transitioned into a waist-high concrete barricade as the road began to slope upward. Easing closer to the barrier, the man snuffed out his flame and leaned over the edge, peering sightlessly into an unwavering shield of darkness. The sound of running water beneath him immediately grew louder. Heartbeat quickening, he realized he was standing atop a bridge.

The man ducked down behind the concrete barricade and sucked in his breath. Did they see the flame before I put it out? Could they have seen my silhouette looming above? Are there even any of them submerged down there?

He knew he couldn’t risk it. Shoving the Bic into his pocket, the man scuttled his way between cars and debris like a crab on a crowded beach. Crouching down, feeling his way through the darkness, he scampered over broken glass and shattered plastic and contorted steel, bumping into open doors and side-view mirrors and rusted out wheel wells. Before long, he was bleeding from nicks and scrapes all over his arms, legs, and face.

As he made his way around an overturned motorcycle missing its front tire, a bank of clouds drifted clear of the moon. The sudden shower of silvery light revealed a welcome sight: He had nearly reached the end of the bridge.

Taking advantage of the unexpected illumination, the man quickened his pace and—

KHROOOMSPLSH!

He whirled around, nearly stumbling on his ass, hand shooting toward the pistol in his waistband with cowboy speed. He braced himself for the blinding blue light show to arise from the water… but nothing came. Nothing he could see, anyway. That didn’t sound like a Scorpion, he thought. More like a piece of the bridge sinking, breaking off and splashing into the river.

He saw something then: a vague shadow flitting across the face of the moon. Something huge, towering, like a skyscraper swaying in high winds, standing just beside the bridge.

And then the clouds were back, and the giant shape was gone.

The man rubbed his eyes and then stared into the darkness. Nothing moved.

Had he imagined it? Somewhere behind him, an owl called out, and he idly wondered if it was trying to warn him. Peering over his shoulder one last him, he started to walk again. Just a trick of the light. That’s all. They don’t get that big. Nothing does.

The rest of that third night was traveled without incident. The unseen owl hooted at the man a few times more, and he soon became convinced that it was following him. Guiding, perhaps. He thought about taking an exit and finding an apartment building to hole up and wait out daylight in, but then he considered Larry and suicide and decomposition, and he only wanted to get away from all the ghosts but his own. No need to go looking for any more.