Offworld (24 page)

"Terry-" Chris began.

But Terry cut him off by turning away and breaking into a run
before anyone could stop him.

"We've still got several hours until dawn," Owen pointed out.
"We should find a place to sleep."

"What about Terry?" Chris asked, soliciting their input. He stared
at the crumpled, burning building beside them.

He just needs to decompress," Trisha said. "I say we leave him
be until morning. Let him sort it out. Why don't we sleep right out
here under the stars? We won't have any trouble building a fire,"
she joked halfheartedly, nodding at the inferno that used to be the
Methodist Hospital.

A night out in the open sounded good to Chris. But regarding
Terry calming clown and decompressing ... Chris didn't share Trisha's
optimism.

Chris awoke to the sound of rapid gunfire.

It was early; the sun was barely above the horizon. And his shoulder ached, still suspended in its immobilizer. It took him a moment
to recognize the sound he was hearing.

The gunfire was coming from a few blocks away. Chris sat up
and looked in that direction, seeing only empty streets and vacant
homes.

He jumped to his feet and ran into the early morning air, Trisha
and Owen right behind. Rounding a street corner, he found Mae
leaning against a telephone pole. Her arms were crossed and she was
staring off into the distance, without a single hint of curiosity.

"What's going on? Where's it coming from?" Chris asked her.

She threw her chin out in a particular direction.

Chris and the others looked. Terry came into view, walking clown
the middle of the street. He was hefting a very large machine gun, emptying it unrelentingly into a luxury sedan parked in front of a
single-story house as if he was trying to get the car to blow up. But
it stubbornly absorbed the bullets without so much as a spark.

Terry was wearing nothing but his boxers and a way-too-big army
flak jacket, unzipped. The jacket's many pockets bulged with contents
Chris couldn't discern from this distance. The bruise to Terry's sternum
from the grocery store collapse was still angry and purple, and could
be clearly seen between the flak jacket's opening.

They watched as Terry strolled through the street, his face peaceful
as though it were perfectly normal to be walking through suburbia
in his underwear firing a gun at inanimate objects. When the big
machine gun had run out of ammo, Terry heaved it aside. Next, he
pulled an Uzi out of some inner recess of the jacket and began firing
it into the windows of an apartment building across the street from
the sedan. He kept shooting until he'd punctured or shattered every
one of the windows that he could see.

Chris shook off the shock of the scene and ran out to meet Terry
in the street.

Terry's gaze flicked his way just for a second. There was no mad
gleam. No menacing gait to his stride. The red face and quick breaths
he'd shown last night were gone. He was the picture of calm. Casual.
Apathetic.

Terry was discarding the Uzi in favor of a pair of semiautomatic
pistols when Chris approached. Terry shot out the tires of the half
dozen empty cars parked on the street.

"What are you doing?!" Chris screamed.

"Does it matter?" Terry replied without looking at him, instead
focusing only on his task.

"Have you lost your mind?" Chris asked, watching as Terry shot
holes into a mailbox.

"Nah," Terry replied, "but this ought to do it." He dropped the
handguns, reached into another pocket and pulled out two grenades.
Before Chris could react, he bit the pins off and heaved them through the air over the roof of a corner house. There was a terrible moment
of silence and then a sunken boom.

Water spray misted onto Chris' face before he even knew what was
happening. The grenades must have landed in someone's pool.

Chris was at a loss. He looked at this man he'd known for years
as if seeing someone he'd never met.

"Where did you get these weapons?" he asked.

"Well," Terry said, as if revealing a little-known secret, "I stumbled
across one of these things called an armory."

Chris ran his fingers through his hair. He considered pulling some
of it out while he was at it.

"You can't just go around doing things like this!" Chris shouted
as Terry pulled out yet another pistol and began firing at a nearby
house.

"Sure I can. Haven't you been watching?"

"Terry," Owen spoke up, and only then did Chris realize that he
and Trisha had joined them, "we are proceeding on the assumption
that we may yet find a way to bring everyone back."

Terry stopped shooting and threw the pistol as far as it would go in
a sudden rage. "They're not coming back, Beech! They're never coming
back! We-the five of us-are it! We are all that's left of the human
race! The world is our playground! Who cares what we do?!"

"I care," said Chris.

Terry rolled his eyes. "I've been cooped up with you three for
two and a half years. We finally get back home to everybody else,
and they're all gone! It's like we're still on Mars, only our one new
companion is a crazy person! Nothing makes any sense! If God exists,
He's got a twisted sense of humor."

Chris stole a quick glance back at Mae, who still leaned against
the house. If she'd heard Terry's comment, she didn't react.

"Going off the deep end isn't going to help anything," Trisha
said quietly.

Terry's shoulders slumped, and Chris knew that Trisha had gotten
to him. Somehow, she always could.

"I, I just ... I'm just saying .. " Terry said, deflating before their
eyes.

Chris wanted to punch the young man standing in his underwear.
"Get some clothes on. We're going."

With those words hanging in the air, Chris stalked away.

An hour later, the group was back on the road, caravanning west
out onto 39, which would eventually curve around to the south and
take them straight into the French Quarter. They'd located two new
vehicles-a red minivan and a white pickup-but this time they carried very few supplies.

Mae, having spent the morning off on her own while the others
looked for transportation, had surprised everyone by returning with
food and clothing she'd found somewhere. Once everyone was settled
in their respective vehicles, and Mae was once again out of earshot,
sitting alone in the pickup truck's bed, Terry quickly pounced.

"I still don't understand how we can just leave her behind," Terry
said into his earpiece as he drove.

"We've been over this, Terry," Chris responded. "Do we really
need to again?"

"But ... I mean, Trish and Beech can't stand her, but they'd both
tell you she's the last person left on Earth, and that's got to mean
something. Right?"

"It's true," said Owen, taking the radio. "We still don't understand
her significance in all this. Leaving her behind could be just as dangerous to us as it is to her."

"She's just a kid," Chris replied. `And she's faced some pretty crazy
stuff with us. If she wants to be done ... it's understandable."

"What if it falls to us to repopulate the human race?" Owen countered. When Terry snickered, he continued with, "I'm serious.
Preposterous-sounding or not, it's a very real possibility."

Terry rolled his eyes. "Whatever, Beech. I say we put it to a vote.
Who says she stays?"

"This is not a democracy, Terry," said Trisha into the radio. "Chris
is in charge. His word is final."

Terry's expression turned sour. "So I noticed."

Chris glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see Terry yank
out his earpiece and throw it onto the floorboard of the truck.

A few minutes passed in silence as they sped down 39, approaching a vertical lift drawbridge that extended over the industrial canal.
It was a gigantic structure of interlocking metal beams, and it was
undoubtedly old, though it looked as if it had been well maintained
over the years.

"Hey, I have a question for our fearless leader," Terry mused,
picking back up his radio. "Why are we driving to Houston when
there are other, faster ways available to us? Why not take another
chopper? Or better yet, a jet?"

Chris' reply was only one word. "No"

"Why?"

Trisha answered, "Because if anyone else is still out there-like
Mae was-we won't find them in the air."

They were halfway across the bridge when a screeching of metal
against metal was heard, and impossibly the vertical lift bridge began
to rise. Both vehicles slammed on the brakes.

"What's going on?!" Terry shouted.

Slowly, the bridge was being lifted into the air as if it were an
elevator. A complex series of x-shaped lattice supports soared over
their heads, with two enormous towers on either end of the bridge.
The bridge was built to do this, to allow for access to the industrial
canal by larger watercraft. But for it to be happening now ... with
them on it ... ?

"Is there a boat drifting in?" Chris asked.

Everyone looked left and right, out both sides of the cars, checking the canal. It was clear.

The bridge continued to lift, twenty feet into the air . . .
forty ...

Thinking about where the bridge controls would be located, Chris
leaned his head out of his side window and looked to the end of the
bridge ahead. A squat, rectangular box of a room was perched on
one of the many metal supports that held the bridge together. As the
bridge rose, they were drawing level with the small control room,
and Chris saw that there was a pair of dingy windows on the side of
the rusted old structure.

His eyes focused on something and he froze.

The bridge rose higher and higher, but no one said a word. They
merely watched in stunned silence. It rose above the control room,
continuing to an incredible height over the canal, until finally it came
to a stop at its topmost point, more than a hundred feet above the
river.

Chris got out of the minivan and walked to the side of the bridge.
He looked down to get a better look at how high up they were.

The others appeared behind him-even Mae-very quickly.

"What just happened?" Trisha asked, joining him at the edge and
peering clown.

"I'm not sure," said Chris, his thoughts racing. Anybody know
how these things work?"

"You mean, could it have been set off automatically?" asked
Trisha.

"No," Chris replied, "I mean how does it raise up and clown,
mechanically speaking?"

"I would imagine," Owen said, "that it works like most elevators,
with cables and pulleys-only on a much larger scale."

Chris turned and looked at one end of the bridge. "Uh-huh," he
replied thoughtfully. Without warning, he took off at a jog until he reached the far end of the bridge, and raced to one corner, searching
for something. The others followed.

"Hey look, there's a ladder on the other side," Terry offered,
pointing to what he saw. "I could climb down and activate the bridge
controls."

But just as Terry was about to make for the ladder, Chris grabbed his
shoulder and held him back. "Not a good idea," Chris said urgently.

"Why not?"

"I'll tell you later," he said, still looking around in the corner.
"There" He pointed to a large, metal coil of cables.

"Yeah," said Owen, "yeah, that looks about right."

Trisha looked from Chris to Owen, wanting to be let in on whatever the two of them were thinking. They'd said nothing to each other,
yet they both seemed to have arrived on the same page. "What are
we doing?" she demanded.

"You still got any weapons in that jacket?" Chris asked, turning
to Terry.

Terry still wore the giant flak jacket he'd had on that morning
while shooting up the neighborhood.

"You're not serious... " Terry replied.

"Chris, a simple bullet wouldn't be enough to sever any of these
cables," Owen said. "These are industrial-strength steel coils. They're
made to withstand a hurricane."

"Not a gun," Chris replied. "I was thinking more of a grenade.
Or a bunch of grenades."

Trisha looked at him like he was crazy, but said nothing.

"Don't understand," Mae said, looking from one of them to another.
"Can't stay up here, right?"

"That's exactly right," Chris confirmed. "And we're getting
down."

"Chris," Owen began, "a free-fall drop with us and all these
vehicles-I'm not sure we'll escape unscathed from that."

"Gonna drop?!" Mae said, her eyebrows up high.

"I'm open to other ideas," Chris said to Owen. "The only other
thing that occurs to me is diving into the river, but it looks too shallow to sufficiently break our fall."

No one said anything. Looks were exchanged.

"We can't stay here," Chris said, summing up his argument. "Something's very wrong about this whole scenario. We need to move.
Now."

When no one disagreed, he said, "Terry, empty your pockets. I
want everything you've got."