IT WAS A HOT, DUSTY half an hour walking up the turnpike to the chain gang. As I approached, a state trooper who’d been leaning against the hood of an abandoned red Audi stood up, and stared at me through a pair of mirrored sunglasses.
Strung out behind him there were maybe thirty convicts wearing orange jumpsuits that said SUPERMAX on the back. Most of the prisoners had push brooms and were sweeping the nails from the road. Maybe six others were working in teams of two to wrestle corpses out of cars and fling them onto a flatbed trailer, latched to a monstrous John Deere tractor down in the grass. The tractor had heavy chains on the tires, but I’m not sure it needed them. The tires themselves were as big as doors, so thick and massive that I doubt the sharpest of those crystal darts could’ve pierced them.
Another couple of staties were starting the cars that could be started and driving them to the center island between the east-and westbound lanes. They had cleared the turnpike all the way to Denver, the road open and empty and quiet. The skyscrapers of the city soared pale blue and distant below us.
“S’your business?” asked the cop who’d been sitting against the Audi. He adjusted the elephant rifle propped against his shoulder.
A lot of the convicts had paused to look up from their sweeping. They’d been at it all morning and smelled that way. It was a ripe man stink, mingled with the corrupted-meat smell of blood baking into the upholstery of all those ditched cars. A hundred thousand flies had been born overnight. The air seemed to vibrate from the beehive hum of them.
“There’s three boys back that way you might want to talk to. They bushwhacked me as I was headed down from Boulder to Denver and tried to abduct me for their end-of-the-world cult. They would’ve got me, too, if I wasn’t rescued by a Good Samaritan who beat the pants off them. He left them taped up in the silver gowns they were wearing. Also, there was a woman with a shopping cart who agreed to turn a blind eye to my kidnapping in trade for my iPhone Plus. But you don’t need to bother with her. A cell phone seems a small thing to worry about in the midst of a national crisis.”
“Got blood in your hair,” said the state trooper in the aviator glasses.
“Yessir. One of ’em belted me with a chain.” I didn’t want to say they had attacked me with astronomical instruments, on account of I didn’t feel that would make my story any more credible.
“Lemme see,” he said.
I ducked my head and gestured to where I’d been struck. He pushed a few rough, callused fingers into my hair, then drew his hand back and wiped his red fingertips off on the hip of his uniform.
“This needs stitches.” He had the clipped, disinterested inflections of Yul Brynner, but for all that, he’d inspected my injury with sensitivity and the blood on his hands didn’t bother him. In the West you will find men like that, fellows with gentle hands and hard, flat voices. Horses and dogs are instinctively loyal to such fellows, while yellowbellies and equivocators instinctively fear them. They make mediocre husbands, good officers of the law, and top-notch bank robbers. He half turned and called out, “Dillett! You do a couple stitches for the lady?”
There was a skinny gink in a state-police uniform, a guy who was mostly knees and Adam’s apple, standing in the flatbed behind the tractor, using a pitchfork to move bodies around. He paused and waved his gray felt campaign hat in acknowledgment.
The head guard looked down into my face and said, “You shouldn’t be walking in this road anyway. We’re in a state of emergency. Unless someone is dying, you shouldn’t be in the open.”
“It’s not someone dying. It’s someone dead. My girlfriend and her mother were struck down in the storm, and I set out for Denver to let her father know.”
He looked away from me and shook his head, like his team just gave up a big lead in the late innings. He didn’t express any condolences, but he did say, “And you were going to walk all the way there, from Boulder to Denver? What if it rains again?”
“I’d hide under a car, I guess.”
“It can be hard to tell the difference between decency and stupidity sometimes. I’m not sure which side of the line this one falls on. But I’ll take a couple of my guys up the pike, and if I come across this gang of girlnappers, I’ll radio back. Officer Dillett will haul you down to Denver on his dad’s John Deere. He’s got a full load of dead folks to drag back to town anyway. You’ll have to make a statement to authorities there.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “What are you guys going to do if it rains? What are all of you going to do?”
“Take cover and start sweeping again when it’s over. If the roads aren’t clear, what good are they? If a government can’t keep the roads open, what good is a government at all?” He cast an unhappy look at the sky and said, “Wouldn’t that be a sad epitaph for the world? ‘Democracy was canceled on account of rain. The human season will be suspended until further notice.’” If he knew he’d just said some poetry, his sunburned, hard-ass, Yul Brynner face didn’t show it.
“Yes, sir. We’ll hope for sun.”
“And try not to worry about how we’re going to raise crops when the clouds are spilling rocks instead of water.”
“Yes, sir.”
I crunched over the loose gravel of a thousand diamond-bright needles and said hello to Dillett, the skinny gink on the flatbed. He said to climb up on the bumper and he’d have a look at my scalp.
Strange to say, that was the best part of that whole long, menacing nightmare of a weekend. I took a shine to Dillett, who was as gangly and loose-jointed as the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz and just as friendly. He pulled on latex gloves and threaded shut my scalp wound, working so light and careful that I didn’t feel any pain at all and was surprised when he was done. Afterward he asked if I wanted an orange soda and a chicken-salad sandwich. I had them both, sitting on the bumper of the trailer with the daylight shining in my face. The sandwich was on sun-warmed slices of seeded rye, and the soda was in a can sweating drops of ice water, and for a while I felt almost human.
A convict—the sort of fat man who is described as morbidly obese—sat on the trailer with the dead folks. He had his right boot off and the foot mummied up in bandages. I caught his name—Teasdale—but didn’t learn much more about him, not then. We didn’t talk until later.
Just as I drained the last fizzy-sweet mouthful of soda, a voice, flat and staticky, burst from the walkie-talkie on Dillett’s hip. It was Yul Brynner.
“Dillett, you there? Over?”
“Copy.”