Somebody had to warn them.
“Oh, shit,” she growled and increased her pace. Running hurt her head, but she didn’t care. She slogged through the mud as fast as her weary legs would carry her.
She got answers to some of her questions a quarter mile down the road. She saw the smoke first and as she rounded a curve in the road she saw the burning car. It was a Toyota RAV4. The vehicle was completely gutted by fire, the tires melted, the windows gone, bullet holes everywhere. Spent brass all over the muddy road.
There were six bodies there. Two of them were still inside the Toyota, both strapped into car seats in the back, burned to charred lumps.
“God, no. ”
She turned away in grief and horror. The bodies on the road were all adults. Two women and two men. Dez knew the women. Katie Gunderson and her sister, Jeanne. Both of them were married, both had kids in preschool.
Had.
“God…”
Lying partly under Jeanne was a man Dez vaguely recognized from town events. A farmworker. She had no idea what his name was. The three of them were riddled with bullet holes. The farmworker was clearly one of the infected. His face and throat had ragged bite marks; but Dez couldn’t see any trace of bites or the black goo on the women.
The last body was a real puzzle, and again it made Dez’s heart sink.
It was a National Guardsman in a torn white hazmat suit. Dez squatted down and gingerly lifted his gas mask to reveal a young face, maybe twenty. He had a bite on his left hand, but it wasn’t the disease that had killed him. Someone had put three rounds through his forehead.
But … why hadn’t they taken the injured man into quarantine, given him some kind of treatment? Why leave his body here? Even if he’d died as a result of the bite, or if they’d killed him because they were terrified of the disease, why leave his body? Leaving a soldier behind is against everything soldiers are taught. They didn’t even take his dog tags. They blew his head off and left.
That made no kind of sense.
Unless …
“Oh … shit,” she said and she could hear the panic in her own tone.
It made no sense unless the Guardsmen were that afraid of the plague. Unless the plague was so desperately dangerous that even the respect for a fallen soldier had to be prohibited.
Dez licked rainwater off her lips. How bad was this thing? She looked at the bodies and then down at the dead soldier.
Do I have it?
The dead kept their secrets, but their silence seemed to mock her, to promise awful things.
Then she heard a squawking sound. At first she couldn’t understand what or where it was, and then she heard it again, and she knew. It was squelch from a walkie-talkie.
Dez found it under the man’s hip. Dez tore off a handful of leaves from a roadside bush and wiped the device clean of blood and mud. She began fiddling with it as she jogged down the road toward her trailer park. When she found a channel where there was some chatter she slowed to a walk and pressed the device to her ear, sticking a finger in her other ear to block out the sound of the storm. There were a lot of voices, lots of overlapping chatter, a lot of emotions running high. The result was a jumble from which Dez could only harvest a few scraps.
“… last of state cops are in the holding pen … primary shooting line with a fallback at twenty yards … helos grounded … two cars of farmers tried to run the south barricade … CDC Wildfire team delayed by storm…”
Only bits and pieces, but it was enough for Dez. And more than enough to convince her not to say anything into the walkie-talkie. If they shot their own and shot civilians …
She heard the phrase “Q-zone” at least a dozen times. Quarantine zone. Had to be. That was both good and bad. Good for the rest of the state, or maybe the rest of the country. Bad as shit for her and her fellow citizens in Stebbins County. It wasn’t a surprise, but it confirmed her worst fears.
Almost her worst. There was another phrase that was peppered through the chatter. Three words. Three terrible words.
… shoot on sight …
Dez stuffed the walkie-talkie into her jacket pocket and began running again. Faster.
A few cars and trucks appeared in the gloom, but each time they were ordinary. Parked where they should be parked, no sign of further violence.
Until she found the second state police cruiser.
It was smashed into a telephone pole half a block from the road that led to her trailer park. The front end was wrapped like a cruller around the shattered stump of the pole. Wires lay across the road like broken spider webs. Chunks of safety glass sparkled as raindrops struck them.