Well, I guess you ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you, girl?
There were pieces of cloth in her pack, and she dug them out and wrapped each of her hands. Burned hands were blunt survival tools, and she couldn’t allow that.
With her makeshift mittens in place, she grabbed a handhold on the tank and began to clamber upward. The tank was easy to scale, and once she was atop the big turret she paused. The machine gun was belt-fed, and there were still a dozen unfired rounds. The weapon was smeared with the dusty brown residue of old blood, and when she turned to examine the curved metal hatch that led down into the tank, there was a clear handprint. The gunner must have been badly hurt, perhaps bitten, when he’d deserted his gun and tried to escape.
She heard a faint moan.
That ain’t the wind, she thought.
The girl pulled her knife and froze, then tilted her head to try to locate the sound.
At first she thought it was behind her, but the road she’d walked was completely empty. Then she heard a faint rasping sound.
No, not rasping.
Scratching.
And then another soft moan.
It sounded so close, and yet there was no movement anywhere.
That’s when she realized where the sound was coming from.
The plaintive moan and the feeble scratches were below her.
The girl turned and looked at the hatch once more. The handprint was partially obscured by the closed lid, and she understood. The wounded, dying gunner had crawled back inside the tank and pulled the hatch shut. Down there in the darkness his wounds had killed him, and the plague that lived in everyone had brought him back.
“Gawd!”
she gasped.
Revulsion filled her, and she gagged at the thought of that soldier, trapped in the iron kettle of the tank, cooked by a dozen summers of Nevada heat, kept alive by the plague. Below that hatch was some blackened nightmare thing, its nails scratching at the underside of the hatch, its hungers awakened by her presence on the turret, its mind consumed by disease and filled only with a need that could never be satisfied, not even if it somehow managed to feast on her. The hungry ghosts of this old world could never eat enough, never feed enough to assuage their monstrous appetites.
She backed sharply away from the hatch, fighting down the urge to throw up.
The horror of it was so great that she missed her footing and tumbled backward, twisting as she pitched off the tank and onto the unforgiving blacktop.
The girl had just enough time to turn her body, to position herself for the impact, as she had been taught in the Night Church. She landed hard, and the jolt drove all the air from her lungs, but nothing broke. However, her blade went tinkling away under a parked car.
“Laws a mercy, girl. You are dumber than a coal bucket,” she groaned.
For a long time she lay there, gasping for hot air, appalled at the image in her mind of that roasted creature scrabbling to escape its prison.
Pain washed through her in waves as she struggled to sit up. As she stood, the world took a lively sideways reel, and she had to slap her hands against the hood of the closest wrecked car for balance.
Screw your head on rightways round, she scolded herself.
She stayed there for a moment, waiting until the world stopped spinning. All she could see were cars that had been rammed into one another or blown to black skeletons by the tank. The scene was typical of many she’d seen, many that her father had interpreted for her. The cars were part of some mad exodus of refugees fleeing the growing armies of the dead. They probably thought that the vacant desert would be a haven, but this tank had been deployed to block the bridge. Maybe the soldiers thought that some of the people in the cars were already bitten, or that the fleeing civilians were smuggling out their dead or dying relatives. That sort of thing had happened a lot, she knew. Growing up, she’d heard countless tales about how people—crazed with fear and grief, confused by the collapse of their world—did insane things. One woman she knew, one of her mother’s personal servants in the Night Church, confessed that she’d carried her own two dead children out of Houston in the trunk of her car. Even though they thrashed and pounded on the trunk after she knew that they were stone dead, the woman had brought them all the way to Wyoming before electromagnetic pulses from the nukes dropped by the army on the major cities killed her car. The woman said that it took four grown men to pull her away from her car so the right thing could be done for her children.
Everyone had stories like that.
Her dad had said that it explained a lot of why the plague had spread farther and faster than it should have.
We killed ourselves, Dad had said. If we’d had a chance to adjust to what was happening, to study on it some, and to know which way to jump—why, then we might not have deviled it all up. But we panicked, and panic fair killed this world.
And laziness is going to kill you, girl, snapped her inner voice. You best collect your knife and your wits before you lose both.
“Knife,” she said aloud.