“Again I have to go with ‘so what?’” Quinn said.
Astrid was on the verge of saying something. Then she shook her head a little, telling herself no. “Never mind, Quinn. Like you said, we’re a long way from normal.”
They loaded up again and took off at twelve miles an hour. They turned on Third and cut back, distancing themselves from town, and ran up Fourth, which was a quiet, shady, decidedly shabby, older residential street close by Sam’s house.
The only cars they saw were parked or crashed. The only people they saw were a couple of kids crossing the street behind them. They heard TV sounds coming from one house, but quickly determined that it was a DVD.
“At least the electricity is still on,” Quinn said. “They haven’t taken away our DVDs. MP3s will still work, too, even without web access. We’ll still have tunes.”
“They,” Astrid noted. “We’ve moved on from ‘God’ to ‘they.’”
They reached the highway and stopped.
“Well. That’s creepy,” Quinn said.
In the middle of the highway was a UPS tractor-trailer. The trailer had broken free and was on its side, like a discarded toy. The tractor, the truck part, was still upright, but off to the side of the road. There was a Sebring convertible smashed against the front. The convertible had not fared well. The impact was head-on. The car was crumpled to about half its usual length. And it had burned.
“The drivers poofed, car driver and truck driver,” Quinn said.
“At least no one got hurt,” Edilio said.
“Unless there was a kid in the car,” Astrid pointed out.
No one suggested checking. Nothing had survived that crash or the subsequent fire. None of them wanted to see if there was a small body in the backseat.
The highway was four lanes, two going each way, not divided, but with a turning lane in the middle. There was always traffic. Even in the middle of the night there was traffic. Now, only silence and emptiness.
Edilio laughed a little shakily. “I’m still expecting some big old truck to come barreling down on us, run us over.”
“It would almost be a relief,” Quinn muttered.
Edilio stepped on the pedal, the electric motor whirred, and they eased out onto the highway, skirting around the overturned UPS trailer.
It was an eerie experience. They were going slower than a strong cyclist on a highway where no one ever traveled at less than sixty miles an hour. They crept past a muffler shop and the Jiffy Lube, past a squat office building that housed a lawyer and an accountant. In several places cars from the highway had plowed into parked cars. A convertible was all the way inside the dry cleaner’s. It had taken out the plate-glass window. Clothing in plastic wrap lay strewn across the car’s hood and into the passenger compartment.
There was a graveyard silence as they drove. The only sound came from the soft rubber tires and the strained whirring of the electric motor.
The town lay to their left. To the right the land rose sharply to a high ridge. The ridge loomed above Perdido Beach, its own sort of wall. The thought had never occurred to Sam so forcefully before that Perdido Beach was already bounded by barriers, by mountains on the north and east, by ocean to the south and west. This road, this silent, empty road, was just about the only way in or out.
Ahead was the Chevron station. Sam thought he saw movement there.
“What do you guys think?” he asked.
“Maybe they have food. It’s a mini-mart, right?” Quinn said. “I’m hungry.”
“We should keep going,” Astrid said.
“Edilio?” Sam pressed.
He shrugged. “I don’t want to be paranoid. But, man, who knows?”
Sam said, “I guess I vote for keeping going.”
Edilio nodded and eased the golf cart to the left side of the road.
“If there are kids there, we smile and wave and say we’re in a hurry,” Sam said.
“Yes, sir,” Quinn said.
“Don’t pull that, brah. We took a vote,” Sam said.
“Yeah. Right.”
There were clearly people at the Chevron station. A slight breeze carried a torn Doritos bag down the highway toward them, a red and gold tumbleweed.
As the golf cart approached, one kid, then another, stepped out into the road. Cookie was the first. The second kid Sam didn’t recognize.
“T’sup, Cookie,” Sam called out as they drew within twenty yards.
“T’sup, Sam?” Cookie replied.
“Looking for Astrid’s little brother, man.”
“Hold up,” Cookie said. He was carrying a metal baseball bat. The other kid beside him had a croquet mallet with green stripes.
“Nah, man, we’re on a mission, we’ll catch you later,” Sam said. He waved, and Edilio kept his foot on the pedal. They were within a couple of feet and would soon be past.
“Stop them,” a voice yelled from the Chevron station. Howard was running and behind him, Orc. Cookie stepped in front of the cart.
“Don’t stop,” Sam hissed.
“Man, look out,” Edilio warned Cookie.
Cookie jumped aside at the last second. The other kid swung his mallet hard. The wood shaft hit the steel pole that supported the cart’s awning. The mallet head snapped off and narrowly missed Quinn’s head.
Then they were past and Quinn yelled back, “Hey, you almost knocked my head in, jerkwad.”
They were maybe thirty feet on and pulling away when Orc yelled, “Catch them, you morons.”