Posted on April 11, 2008

The Hole: Part 68

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.