Posted on May 16, 2007

The Hole: Part 5

He didn’t move, thinking over what she’d said. Was she going to leave? There could be anything out there beyond the few blocks of quiet and calm they’d known these prior weeks. if she did leave, if she did intend to find the Hole, Elliot would go with her. Sitting alone in his house as she, the only living person he knew, walked away would be the worst kind of contrition to this victorious plague. His home was a shell, his neighborhood an lifeless wreck. He’d follow Evajean because she still walked and breathed, was still warm–and was without the madness of the infected.

Decision energizing his movement, he followed her now into the living room. She was seated on the couch, head back on the cushions, a nearly full glass of whiskey resting on one leg.

She looked up as he came in. “I can’t drink it,” she said.

Elliot closed his eyes and nodded. “I understand,” he said.

“I need to get out.”

“Now?”

She smiled at him. “No, not now. If I’m going to do this–find the Hole–I really should pack. Get some stuff together. Fill up the car with food and clothes.”

“Supplies,” he said.

“Uh huh.”

He took the glass from her and swallowed a mouthful of the drink. It was terrible stuff, harsh and bitter. Elliot never drank it, save during college when they’d poured it over ice and pretended they were characters from the pulp novels. “I want to go with you,” he said.

Evajean looked at him long, far longer than she done since he’d helped her carry Henry across the lawn. He thought she’d say no, tell him this was a journey she needed to do for herself and by herself, a spiritual quest of sorts about a lone woman making her way across the apocalypse to find the answers to the mysteries that assaulted her. But–and this surprised the hell out of him in its suddenness–he was prepared to beg.

“I want you to,” she said, however. “I don’t want to do this alone.”

Talk spiraled between them for the next hour, with discussions of how they’d get wherever they were going and what to bring and what to leave. Elliot realized how rushed it all felt and how consumed the two were with it, like children who’d made plans to run away and seek their fortune in a wide world free of parental control. If they stopped to think it all over, the spell would break, the absurdity of driving into a dead wilderness without direction would pound them back into sensibility and they’d retire to their homes to await the return of the authorities. They’d become sensible adults again.

Elliot pushed through those doubts. There was nothing left so why not go for it? He didn’t know Evajean beyond friendly hellos as neighbors, but she was enthusiastic (manically so, he recognized, and probably coping barely at all with the terrifying grief they both felt) and attractive and the idea of seeking out the Hole with her, whatever it turned out to be, had immediately, and with a sense of salvation, trumped the depression and defeatism inflicting him like the as yet unexperienced plague.

So they prepared. It was decided early on they’d take Elliot’s truck, the Ford F-250 that had been the chariot of the landscaping business he’d run with his brother before Clarine had talked him into moving out to the east coast. The back could hold all the food the two of them had on hand as well as a good deal more. Mileage wasn’t great but Evajean said there were bound to be plenty of cars out there they could siphon gas from as needed.

During breaks for lunch and dinner they finished the perishable food in Elliot’s freezer. Now it was entirely cans and dry goods–and whatever else they picked up along the way. And what “along the way” meant exactly became their first significant argument as a hastily assembled couple.

“It’s west, is what I heard,” Evajean said, pushing around the last of her meat.

“West?” A night a month ago, when he was on his fifth beer at the road house bar outside of Charlottesville he went to when he needed to get away from things, Elliot had been told by a trucker heading through to Richmond that the Hole was in Montana. The guy said he had a buddy who’d been hired by the state to haul corpses there but that things had gone irreparably to shit before he’d had a chance to get started.

Evajean said, “In Colorado, in the Rockies, I think. The same place they have that military base.”

“NORAD?”

She nodded. “That sounds right. Henry, my husband, he showed me a website. He’d gotten kind of obsessed with it before he got sick and this one site had a lot of eyewitness things about people who’d followed the trucks, the ones that came and got the bodies, and how the trucks were dumped into bigger trucks that went west to–what was it?”

“To NORAD?”

“At least that’s what this website said.”

“I heard Montana,” he said and told her about the trucker and his buddy.

“I don’t think so,” Evajean told him, shaking her head. “What’s in Montana? If this is like you said, if the Hole is a place to see if someone can figure out the plague, it makes a lot more sense for it to be a hidden military base where they can have scientists and doctors and keep it all secret. Because what if this plague was terrorism.” She said this last like the thought had just now occurred to her–like it hadn’t been all over the news channels for months–and her startled eyes went wide. “What if it was terrorism, Elliot? What if we’re all dying because those guys in the Middle East–”

“If it was terrorism,” he said, “it’s over now. Whoever did it’s dead, too.”

She breathed heavily, calming herself. “I want to go to Colorado,” she said.

“Because of a website? The Hole in Montana makes a lot more sense than some underground bunker. How many bodies were there? Millions? How would they fit all those people in a tunnel under the mountains? And Montana is coming from a guy who was hired to take them there. Your website– Most of that stuff online’s bullshit, anyway.”

“Henry wouldn’t have showed it to me if it was bullshit,” Evajean said, anger sharpening her tone. “He makes his living on the Internet, anyway, so he knows when sites are good.”

He didn’t bother to correct her tense. And, after several more back and forth protests of quickly waning heat, they settled on driving west to Colorado and then, if the NORAD hypothesis failed to pan out, going north into Montana.