He’d been too late for that.
No, he wasn’t going to stop for soldiers and he wasn’t going to stop to vomit. He wasn’t going to stop until he ran out of gas, until he’d put as many kilometers between the area and himself as possible. The officials claimed the situation was under control, but the area in which they claimed it was contained seemed to grow every day. That, plus the original broadcasts, which featured local newscasters and party officials he recognized, had been replaced by people he didn’t know, people from outside the province. There had been rumors at the factory, rumors at the market. He knew of at least two men who had been working in the mines who had not yet been allowed home. Worse than any of that, and what had finally prompted him to steal a set of keys for the truck and stow a water bottle and a little food in the pockets of his jacket—the most he could manage without calling attention to himself—was that three days ago all communications with the outside world had been cut off. No landlines, no cell phones, no Internet. Nothing in or out. Just the official television and radio broadcasts.
It had been only five days since the first incident at the mine. He had assumed it was just another accident, but it didn’t take long for the whispers to start spreading. A virus. The army experimenting with chemical or biological weapons. The old woman who brought him his soup at the restaurant around the corner from his apartment insisted that it was ghosts, that the miners had disturbed some sort of supernatural force. The sister of one of his friends, a girl who spent most of her free time reading pirated copies of American novels for teenagers, claimed it was either vampires or zombies, and that was why the army arrived so quickly.
At first, he didn’t think too much of any of it. People died in the mines. That’s the way it was. At least he didn’t have to work there. While he didn’t love his job in the factory, at nineteen he made more money in a month than his parents were willing to believe. They kept insisting he was exaggerating when he told them his salary. He had a small apartment to himself. He had his own television, a cell phone, a computer, and he even had the occasional night alone with that sister of his friend. His own sister and her two children were only a short walk away from his apartment, and she had him over for dinner a few nights each week. So if he did not see his parents as often as he would have liked, the five-hour bus trip something of a hardship, it was hard to complain.
Five nights ago, when most people thought it was just an accident, he’d had dinner with his sister, and while he bounced his nephew on his knee, his sister’s blowhard husband went on and on about safety lapses at the mine, about how this sort of thing was bound to happen with all the steps they skipped. Four nights ago, he’d been aware that there was talk, but it was one of those nights when his girlfriend—or whatever she was to him—had come over, and the two of them didn’t do much talking.
But it was three nights ago that he really took notice. He’d cooked himself dinner and then tried to go online. His computer was having none of it. He wasn’t concerned, because even though the village had a relatively fast Internet connection, it was sporadic. Then he pulled out his cell phone to call his parents and realized he didn’t have a signal. And on the television, every channel was blank except for the official local channel, which was on a one-hour loop. He sighed, read for a while, and then went to sleep.
It wasn’t until the next morning, on his way to the factory, that he noticed just how many soldiers had come to the area. Then he saw the coils of wire going up and realized that the boys in uniform, boys his own age, were clutching their rifles a little too tightly. He normally kept to himself at work, but during his lunch break he sat with a group of older men. He was shocked when he heard that the mine had been sealed off, that none of the men who’d been working when the incident occurred had been allowed to go home. Then, later, near the end of his shift, the foreman came on over the loudspeakers and announced that they were expected to continue on, that nothing was wrong, and they should keep coming in for their shifts.