Becky appeared in the kitchen entryway with Cobalt in her arms when the pounding started on the front door. It slammed on its hinges, shaking the front of the house, but didn't open.
It was already locked, thank God.
Becky cried out and ran to Cam. "What the fuck is that?"
Through the window, Cam looked at Joe. His friend's face was sickly, the same stretchy skin and cracked lips as the rest of the world. There was desperation in his eyes coupled with a panic unlike anything Cam had ever seen. "We don't have water," Cam said.
"He has water," Dick yelled. "They had a whole jar of it at the trailer. I saw it."
Cam wanted to go outside and kill Dick, smash his head in somehow. Here was the guy who'd masterminded the fatal beating of Becky's brother, the guy who would have killed Cam too if he'd caught him. The guy deserved a slower death than he was already getting. Only the guns out there were keeping Cam from doing anything stupid.
"Jesus, Cam, if you have water you gotta share it with us." Joe's palms were flat against the window pane, trying to raise the glass.
"What are you doing here, Joe?" Cam reached out and latched the window closed. The front door banged again as someone gave it another kick.
"Everyone in the whole damn city knows you have water. That guy saw you with it." Joe pointed to Dick. "Is it true?"
"What's he talking about?" Becky asked.
Cam saw the sudden fear in her eyes, saw the baby in her arms and felt terrified and angry all at once. What if these psychos tried to hurt his kid like they'd done to Scott?
He suddenly remembered Scott saying something about shooting his father's gun. It had to be in the house somewhere. Keeping his voice low, he asked Becky where it was.
"It's in Scott's bedroom, in his closet, I think."
Bang! The door shook again. Bang!
"C'mon, Cam," Joe said, still trying to get the window open. "I gave you a place to stay, just give me some water. Fair is fair."
"You kicked me out, Joe."
"Yeah, well, you should see the mold in my bathroom. And I still got your hair everywhere and...just give us some goddamn water or they're going to kill you, you fucking asshole!"
Mold, thought Cam. With that, the final piece of the salt water equation fell into place.
"Oh, my God," he said, turning to Becky. "I think I know how Jack did it."
Becky was trembling, holding Cobe in her arms like she was trying to jam him inside her body to protect him. "What? How?"
"Simple..." He looked back at Joe, was about to tell him the secret, but stopped when he saw Dick pressed up against the window.
"Hi, shithead," Dick said, right before swinging an ax into the glass.
Cam yanked Becky down as the window exploded. Tiny glass daggers fell to the floor around them like a death rain. Instantly, he could hear the mob rush the house and start pounding on the walls. The whole place shook like it was in the epicenter of an earthquake. The mob was so loud, so bloodthirsty, Cam had to yell over their war cries to hear himself.
"Becky! Get the gun! Hurry! Go!"
Still holding Cobe, Becky ran down the hall to Scott's room, damn near hysterical as she went.
Cam grabbed a butcher knife from the knife holder on the counter. As Dick grabbed the windowsill to hoist himself up and in, Cam rammed the knife down hard. The blade stabbed through the tendons in Dick's hand, pinning him to the sill. The man screamed bloody murder, but it gave Cam a second to breathe.
He needed three things: A pot, its lid, and a lighter.
He found the pot and lid in one of the cabinets near the stove, ran into the living room and jammed them inside Scott's backpack, which still sat on the couch from two days ago.
"Becky!"
From down the hall: "Oh my God, Cam!"
"Lighter! Where's a lighter!"
"Lighter?"
"Yes, lighter! A fucking lighter! Where is one!"
She came running out of the room, Cobe in one arm and the rifle in the other. She was haphazardly carrying bullets in the same hand as the gun.
Cam suddenly realized she was wearing only her bathrobe and pajamas. He himself was barely dressed in just his boxer shorts and a t-shirt. Neither was wearing shoes.
"There's a lighter in that drawer there." She pointed to a cabinet near the front door, which was shaking fiercely in its frame. He grabbed the lighter from the drawer and threw it in the bag. Next, he ran into the kitchen (Dick still groaning at the window), got the satellite radio and added that to their supplies.
"Get behind me," he said, and took the gun from her hand.
"I'm not letting them touch, Cobe. I'll fucking kill them."
He raised the gun at the door just as an ax cut through its center (just like in that Kubrick movie, he thought). A hand reached through and undid the latch, and suddenly Joe was there, his chest rising and falling with adrenaline. Cam cocked the rifle. "Back up, Joe."
"Please, Cam, we just want a drink. We're dying."
"We're all dying."
From behind Joe, someone screamed out to "Shoot the fucker and take the water." People started piling into the house. One of them raised a gun at Cam, but thankfully didn't shoot.
From behind him, Cam heard people coming through the sliding glass door that led to the back yard.
They were surrounded.
"We're leaving, Joe. I don't want to shoot you but I will. I've got a backpack here. Nothing else. I'll show you what's in it."
Joe said nothing, not quite sure what to make of this.
"Becky, open the pack."
Still holding Cobe-who was suffering from the lethargic effect of the dehydration-she opened the pack and leaned it toward Joe.
"See," Cam said, "nothing in there but a pot and radio. Nothing on us unless you feel like sticking your hand in my ass and checking."
Joe shook his head.
"The house is yours," Cam continued. "Search around if you think we have water. We're leaving. The first man who gives us a problem gets shot. We're all dying, Joe... do me a solid, okay? Let us leave and die in peace."
For a second it looked like Joe and his cohorts might leave, but instead they fanned out through the house, tearing it apart. One of them was wearing a policeman's uniform.
Grabbing Becky, Cam led them outside, listening to the destructive noises coming from the house, the sound of civilization seeping further into hell. When he looked around, he gasped. He hadn't been outside in over a day, and didn't really know how bad it had gotten.
Everything was dead.
Everything.
The trees, the plants, all of it brown. No more lawn. No more leaves. Dead animals littered the road. Some skeletal corpses lay on a neighbor's lawn. There were no birds singing. Cars were parked wherever they'd died. The sky was void of clouds, the sun fiery and oppressive.
"Jesus," he whispered.
A grunting sound caught his attention and he turned to see Dick still stuck to the window sill, trying to yank the knife from his hand. His face was blistered and pocked with bleeding pustules. His mouth was a mass of dried blood and open fissures.
"Hi, Dick," he said. "How's that salt water treating you?"
Dick turned, saw Cam watching him. He stopped struggling and said, "Go on, shoot me. You think I care? It's better than this."
"I'm not gonna shoot you," Cam said. "I'm gonna torture you."
"What?"
"What?" Becky said as well, still frantic to get Cobe to safety.
"Not like that, Dick. Not with pain. With this: knowledge. I know where to get drinking water. Jack knew it too, and I bet you a million fucking dollars he would have explained it to you had you just asked. But you didn't ask, you greedy fuck. You just decided to kill him, like you did Scott."
Becky gasped and managed to get in powerful punch to Dick's eye before Cam put out a hand held her back. "So I'm going to leave now, and you'll never find us, and we'll be drinking water while you die a slow death stuck to my window. That's your torture."
Dick's eyes went wide, and just as he started to scream, no doubt to inform everybody of what Cam had just said, Cam smashed the butt of the gun into his nose and knocked him clean out.
CHAPTER 21.
They'd been driving for a while and Becky's arms, supporting the baby, were hurting. Cobe hadn't made a sound in a long time, and that was scaring her to death. Some kind of made-up prayer had been rolling off her lips for several minutes: "You're my precious baby and we'll play in the playground soon. You're my precious baby and we'll play ..."
It hurt her throat just to talk.
She pressed her ear against the baby's chest to make sure he was still alive, and found herself crying when she felt his breath. The sobs came out in gigantic gasps.
She was losing it, and she knew it. It was more concerning that she was starting not to care.
Next to her, Cam looked over but didn't say anything.
"How much farther?" she asked, trying to regain her composure. Outside her window, a large marine mammal lay dead and dry in the sand. Some kind of whale; she wasn't any good with that stuff. Scott had loved the Discovery Channel but she was a gossip show kind of person. Whatever it was it looked big, with sharp teeth and large black eyes. She'd have hated to meet it in the water.
Back when there was water in the Pacific Ocean Next to her, staring through the dirty windshield, Cam pointed straight ahead and answered. "Until we find it," he said.
And then the SUV died. Just like that.
Just like everything else was doing.
Dying.
"That was a long way for fumes," Cam said. His voice was slow and strained. His mouth was hurting him. "We got lucky. Real lucky."
"Oh God, Cam, it's fucking starting to hurt."
"Me too. Gotta keep moving, though. Gotta find the water."
Getting out of the SUV, Cam took two bicycles off the roof and put them on the sand. He'd found them at an abandoned house on the way to the beach. Thankfully the SUV had a bike rack (Dick, Joe, and the rest of the Loose Screw Brigade had slashed the tires on his own car and snapped his surfboard in half so he'd had little choice but to take Scott's vehicle). He opened the backpack, added some tools from the trunk and some dead tree branches he'd picked up, and slipped it on.
"Come on," he said. "We've got to keep going. We've got to stay ahead of it."
She was about to rebut when she was suddenly racked with intense cramps, nearly dropping Cobe as she bent forward and grunted. Cam was on it, grabbing the baby from her arms. She bent over and dry heaved into the dirt for several minutes. Her insides screamed with need...need for water. For any kind of liquid that would satisfy her body's withered, dry cells. When it passed, she stood sucking in air like a hooked fish in a boat until she could walk again.
"I'll hold the baby," Cam said, climbing onto one of the bikes.
As she got on the other bike, she saw the baby was limp in Cam's arms. "I don't want you to hold him," she said.
"What?"
"Give me my baby! You don't get to hold him! You don't even love me!" She wasn't quite sure where this was coming from, but it had been in her for a while and it seemed to take control. This man, this person whom she'd loved-still loved-had ripped her heart out and now wanted to take her baby and carry him around like a rag doll. He wasn't a rag doll, he was her creation. Her life. Her little Cobe whose heart was still pure and innocent. She wouldn't let Cam destroy her baby. Cobe wasn't going to leave her because of Cam's stupidity.
Right?
Maybe she was wrong. She felt so dizzy, she didn't know what was what anymore. All she knew was that the lifeless form in Cam's arms was not her Cobe. Her Cobe was a giggling, cooing, crying little boy; he most certainly did not hang limp.
"Don't drop him," Cam said, giving her back the baby.
She snatched the boy out of his arms and cradled him close, felt his heart beating against her eardrum. The sound echoed through the pounding headache she was fighting.
"You cool now?" Cam asked.
She didn't know. What did cool mean, anyway? Could cool exist in their circumstance? Did cool exist in someone like Cam, with his face all white and...
Jesus.
It was as if she was noticing his features for the first time in days. Face gaunt, eyes sunken, lips covered in dried blood from where they'd split, his skin loose around his neck like a turkey's waddle.
Did she look the same way? Did everyone who was still alive look that way?