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Only once did they see any larger groups of people, and that had been at a
point where the freeway dipped down below the old narrow road they were
pedaling along.
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Jed braked to a halt, standing astride the Engesser, swatting flies away from
his face. "Will you look at that, Jeff?"
"Reminds me of a squatters' township in some dirt-poor Fourth World country."
Smoke rose from several places among shacks built from scrapped vehicles. The
smell of roasting meat came flirting its way toward the two men.
Fifteen or twenty ragged, filthy figures came slowly out into the sunlight to
stare back at the invaders.
Most of them held makeshift weapons, spears made from metal railings and crude
bows and arrows.
They stood in a sullen, close group, looking up at Jeff and Jed.
The two men didn't say anything to each other. In unison they simply turned,
remounted their trail bikes and rode away.
It was Jeff Thomas who finally broke their silence seven or eight miles
farther west. "I've seen the future," he said, his voice quiet above the
humming of the tires. "And I have to tell you it doesn't work."
JED HAD BEEN RIGHT. The chaos was unbelievable.
Every road they came to was blocked by stalled and abandoned vehicles. Twice
there'd been fires and hundreds of cars had been fused into a huge carbonized
block of blackened metal, the heat of the fireball melting the highway itself.
It was a quiet, beautiful October morning, and the still air was filled with
the dry, brittle smell of death.
The open ground on either side of the freeway was carpeted with corpses.
Families lay together, embracing in death.
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Glinting among the dried corpses was the now-familiar sight of empty pill
bottles.
Green-and-brown glass, shining in the water sunlight like so many discarded
jewels. The last resort of the starving and desperate refugees who had finally
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taken control of their destiny, choosing the time and place of their own
deaths.
The last freedom left to them.
Jed and Jeff found the sight and stink of mass death so insidious, even months
after the event, that they took a different route toward the city. They cut
around to the north of Mount Diablo, finding fewer holdups that way.
But they also discovered that the big San Andreas Fault had been at work. Over
the years the fragile earthquake zone of central California had been
increasingly active, with major jolts in both 2012 and 2027.
It was Jed who drew the short straw.
He was cycling a little ahead of his comrade, freewheeling down a steep,
winding grade. Thoughts of caution and potential danger left him, with the
exhilaration of the wind through his hair, the pavement unrolling beneath the
wheels.
He took both feet off the pedals, head back, whooping at the top of his voice.
Leaning into the sharp curves, feeling the adrenaline rush of danger as the
tires slithered on loose gravel, he was riding on the far edge of control.
He never even saw the section of road where the fault had worked its malign
magic, turning a fifty-yard stretch into a corrugated washboard with jagged
cracks and humps.
The bike left the ground, and he felt himself tumbling sideways. A moment of
flying and then the impact. A grinding crash and a splintered vision& spinning
sky and earth and sky and earth and earth.
He could hear the faint sound of a wheel spinning and, somewhere, a bird
singing.
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"Jed, you all right?"
"Think so. Down here."
"I hit that road section. Fucked my front wheel and bent the frame. I came
off."
"Yeah, me too." Jed fell quiet, realizing that this was a foolish thing to
say.
"Guess you know that, Jeff." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]