Chương 83: Chapter 80: George’s Run (XV)

George plunged into the next memory as soon as the previous one finished. He wanted to get this room over with. Memory Five: The Radio The memory began with the sound of rain on the roof of a car. George was lying down in the back seat. He sat up and looked around him. A large hiking backpack filled the front passenger seat. There was a wet poncho wadded up in the footwell. The car was on an interstate packed with other empty cars. This was months after the world fell apart. And it was after the bunker.

George had been walking south for weeks, learning how to survive on the road. He had left the bunker when their radio had begun acting strangely. At first, it started turning on at odd times and playing songs George recognized—songs with memories attached to them. Hotel California. Tom Petty. Fleetwood Mac. Jackson Browne. Then instead of the songs, it was the voices of George's children. The first time George heard Kat's voice, he came running into the room where the radio was.

He started fumbling at the controls and tapping the button on the microphone until Jack came in and showed him how to use it. He tried to reply but he could never get a response. Kat kept talking. She seemed upset. She asked where he was. She said that she had found a safe place and that Max and Kit were with her. She gave directions and coordinates. She told him to come join them. The radio turned on at the same time each morning and when the message played, you couldn't turn the volume down or change the station.

It was like the message was on every station. It wasn't always Kat. Sometimes it was Max. Or Kit. They begged him to come and repeated the coordinates. Sometimes they were sad or angry. Once, the message was only the sound of Kit crying. Cynthia was the one who accidentally discovered that the message still played even if the radio wasn't plugged in.

The people in the bunker loaded him up with what supplies they could spare and sent him out alone on the journey toward the coordinates that had come through the radio. Then, he started walking south. That was weeks ago. Now he got his travel gear on in the cramped space in the backseat of the car. He looked around in every direction through the rain spattered windows to scan for shapes moving through the trees or among the other derelict cars crowding the highway.

He pulled his boots out of the driver's seat where he had left them to dry out. They were still wet. He squished his feet into them and donned his backpack, turning his body sideways to pull it on. Lastly, he pulled the damp poncho over his whole body and the hiking backpack. Then he waited. It would happen any minute now. The daily radio message had become his signal to start walking again. He watched the darkened, blank stereo, and, sure enough, the radio turned on even though the power in the car was still off.

It was Max this time. The voice said George was doing a good job. He was almost there. George should arrive at the place where his family waited this afternoon. When he saw a yellow billboard that said "Tiny Kingdom Family Campground," he was to walk into the woods perpendicular from the road. He would see a wall of shimmering light, sort of like a rainbow but on the ground.

"Don't worry about it," the voice said.

"Just walk through it and we'll be there on the other side." George didn't let himself think about how strange all this was. He'd come this far. And everything had been so strange for months now. And these were the voices of his children. They were telling him to come, so he was coming. They must have found some way to track him and to make the radios turn on. He was sure that they could explain it when they were together. The radio message ended and the radio shut off again.

George opened the car door and walked into the downpour. The sound of rain was loud on the hood of his poncho. The interstate here was a graveyard of cars. It seemed like when the apocalypse kicked off, everyone in America panicked and did the first thing they could think of, which seemed to be "get in my car and go somewhere else." Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. But it didn't work out for them.

He had learned not to look in the cars if he didn't have to. Most of them were empty but not all of them. If he saw broken glass or blood anywhere near the vehicle, he never looked in. It was hard to resist the tendency to try to piece together stories about the scenes of disaster he walked passed. He had taken to repeating a mantra in his mind in those moments. He would recite: Kit, Kat, Max. Kit, Kat, Max. Kit, Kat, Max over and over again. But the cars had also proved to be his salvation.

They represented safety. He could almost always find an unlocked car to sleep in every night, or, in a pinch, break a window and unlock it himself. He'd done this with an RV last week and slept on a bed for the first time in weeks. Sometimes the cars contained packaged snacks that he could tide him over and delay the inevitable trips into the towns he passed through. The towns had become more dangerous than the road.

Sometimes, he even found a car with the keys that was also free enough of the tangle of traffic that he could drive it down the road for a while until it either ran out of gas or, more likely, he came to an impassable snarl of traffic, or the remains of an accident. However, the cars could be dangerous, too. Once, he had tried to open a door and the alarm had gone off. He ran away from the alarm as quickly as he could with the bulky backpack flopping around on his back.

As he ran, he heard what sounded like a loud bird call coming from the woods ahead of him. He unclipped the waist belt in a hurry and threw it under a truck, tucking his body beneath vehicle beside the bag. More of those high-pitched calls were coming from the woods on one side of the interstate. Then he felt the road rumbling and the sound of broken glass and crushed metal coming from down the road behind him. The cacophony swept over him as the herd of creatures passed George's hiding place.

The undercarriage of the truck pressed into his back as one of them leapt from car to car and landed in the truck bed. He could see scaled, taloned feet running passed him on either side of the truck. The creatures attacked the car with the alarm going off until they damaged it enough that the alarm died with a final warbling bleat. He had stayed under the car for a long time, long past the time the creatures ambled away into the woods. But today the road was quiet and the woods were empty.

He ducked into the shelter of an overturned semi and ate an energy bar. The rain kept hammering on the metal walls of the container. The back of the semi had been full of TVs. Many of the boxes had broken open when the semi tipped over and were now slowly leaking styrofoam onto the road as the stray gusts of wind pulled more of them out of the truck. After the truck, the weather began to clear up. In another hour, he arrived at the sign Max told him about.

It was a bright yellow billboard that said "Tiny Kingdom Family Campground. 10 Miles." Beside the words was a picture of a happy family but the right side of the billboard was damaged and only part of the family was visible. He turned to the right and walked into the woods. He'd been walking for about twenty minutes before he noticed what was bothering him about the forest. Except for the sound of the wind in the trees, it was completely silent. There were no birds nor any other sign of animal life.

It really did look like a wall made of rainbow: a strange, rippling shimmer, like a thirty-foot curtain hanging between the trees. He could see the vague shapes of trunks and branches through it, but nothing beyond them. He looked down the length of the iridescent wall and saw the branches of trees moving in and out of the barrier when the wind blew them. He picked up a stick and pushed it into the barrier. He felt no resistance. It might as well be passing through a shaft of sunlight.

He thought of Max saying to walk through it and that they would be waiting for him on the other side. He peered through again but couldn't see anyone on the other side. He walked close to the barrier and lifted one leg to step through. He was surprised to find himself holding his breath as if he was about to be submerged in water. He closed his eyes and stepped through. He felt no sensation as he passed through the rainbow wall. He stumbled on the other side and opened his eyes.

He was no longer alone, but the people arrayed around him were not his children.

"There he is," one of them said. There were seven of them. They were clothed in a motley mix of normal clothes, military fatigues, and some with unrecognizable armor that looked like it had come off the set of a sci-fi movie. One of them had a fully mechanical arm that connected to his shoulder and moved like a normal arm.

"Grab him," a woman said. Several of them stepped forward, including the man with the metal arm. One man stepped behind George and put a hand on the back of his neck.

"What is this? Who are you?" George said. Instead of answering, the one with the metal arm took a syringe out of a pouch on his waist. He held it up and squirted a bit of liquid out of the needle. George tried to turn around, tried to walk away but two more people grabbed him by the arms.

"Where are my children?" The metal-armed man said, "Your children?" Then, he stuck the needle into his shoulder and injected him with whatever was inside the syringe. George meant to struggle harder to get away but suddenly his whole body felt incredibly heavy. Most of the hands let go of him. He took a step in one direction and then his knees gave out. He tried to speak but heard himself make a slurred hash of words that even he couldn't understand.

He fell to the ground and the last thing he noticed before he passed out was that his body was being rolled onto a stretcher and lifted up. George tried to move again but found that he could not. His eyes slid closed and he lost consciousness.