Andy squinted at the map, shading her eyes from the summer sun. “Fifty kilometers? That’s what, about thirty miles? We’re not walking thirty miles.” The journey at sea had taken its toll on Morgan, and the yellow bruising around her eye on her otherwise pale face now gave her a deathlike appearance. “We can either hope to find a car in town or go back to the boat and sail north along the coast.”
“I don’t think I can spend another minute on that boat,” Morgan uttered weakly and pleaded with her eyes. “I’m sorry, but I know I’ll get sick again.”
“Okay, then we’ll just have to find a car and some gas,” Andy replied in her most reassuring voice. She then exchanged her pistol for the shotgun in Charlie’s hand and nodded toward a rickety wooden bench on the other side of the road. “Wait there while I take a look around.”
As Andy watched them cross the road, she couldn’t help but notice how frail Morgan looked. Already a thin girl, her weight had clearly dropped since her attack.
Salvo was nothing more than a hollowed-out ghost town swept away by wind, sand, and time. The beach homes and restaurants that had once received proper care and attention now showed all the obvious signs of abandonment: peeling paint, broken windows, and cracked sideboards. After a few blocks, Andy stumbled across two human skeletons lying on the sidewalk, partially covered in tattered clothing, and skirted around them.
“Where is everybody? Are they all dead?” she muttered aloud after several blocks. She came across a few cars but no keys. She tried hotwiring them, a skill Charlie had taught her, but the batteries where dead. Andy soon gave up and returned to her friends.
“No luck,” she reported. “Not that I’m surprised. Anyone passing through this place in the last five years probably snatched up any running car long ago.”
“Then let’s head back to the boat,” Charlie suggested. “Morgan, I know you’re not feeling well, but we don’t really have another choice.”
Though hardly excited by the idea of returning to the boat, Morgan understood.
Unfortunately that afternoon, an uncooperative wind worked against their sails, and it took more than half a day to reach Nags Head, thirty miles to the north along the Outer Banks. By sundown, they anchored the boat and chose to remain onboard another night.
***
The sun rose to a clear sky the following morning. Groggy, Andy crawled out of her tiny bed and checked on the others in the second bedroom below deck. Morgan was snoring like a log, but Charlie was beginning to stir.
Andy crept toward the side of his bed. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” she whispered.
“Err…nooo,” he groaned and rolled away.
She gave his shoulder a nudge. “C’mon…time to get the sails up. The winds look good.”
Charlie rubbed his eyes open and looked over at his comatose sister. “Probably just as well. Her snoring was non-stop last night.” Sitting up, his short brown hair stuck up in the back like feathers. “I should’ve told her to go into your room.”
Laughing at the sight of Charlie’s hair, Andy followed up the narrow ladder to the deck.
The conditions for sailing proved far better than the previous afternoon. As the vessel reached the coastal border between North Carolina and Virginia, Charlie asked Andy how far north she planned to go. She looked at their map and understood exactly what Charlie was asking. The mouth of the Chesapeake Bay was approaching. If they were intending to go to Washington DC or Baltimore, they should sail up the Bay. If Philadelphia or New York was their destination, they would need to continue along the Atlantic Coast.
“We’re going to Washington,” Andy said.
“Why there?”
“It’s the capital. Why not start there?”
Charlie saw no reason to argue. He’d never been to the United States. “That’ll take a couple of days to get there if we sail the whole way,” he replied while examining the map.
“Well, it’s either this or keep looking for a car that works. And has gas.”
Charlie turned back to the ladder. He was thinking of his sister.
“We can dock at Virginia Beach and look again,” Andy offered, reading his mind.
The sailboat reached the eastern side of Virginia Beach by late afternoon. As they walked along the shore and passed several beachfront hotels, they discovered that the coastal city appeared to be just as deserted as the Outer Banks. Heading inland, they found many cars and trucks in the parking lots of empty restaurants and stores, but after using the stock of the shotgun to break the windows of each vehicle, they found that none of the engines would start. Discouraged, they returned to the sailboat and prepared to spend another night onboard.
***
When Andy woke up the next morning, she found Charlie already raising the sails. “You’re up early.”
“Figured we should get moving. The weather doesn’t look promising.”
Andy turned west and gazed up. The clouds were low and gray. Frowning, she pulled on her rain jacket as Morgan appeared from below. Immediately seeing the sky, she helped her brother hoist the remaining sails while Andy undocked the boat.
Rain began to fall as they passed over the westernmost tunnel of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, but the winds propelled the sailboat up the Bay faster than predicted. As the storm quelled hours later, the mouth of the Potomac came into view. Still, it was hard to tell exactly where they were.
“There’re too many of these stupid inlets!” Andy yelled while shoving the map aside.
“This has to be it,” Charlie decided.
“How do you know?”
“Based on the distance we’ve travelled today, this has to be the Potomac.”
“So why don’t we dock and see for sure?” Morgan suggested.
Upon finding a large enough pier, they anchored once again, and after walking inland almost a mile, they discovered through various street signs that they were in a town called Reedville.
Charlie retrieved the map from his back pocket. “Ha, I was right!” he exclaimed and pointed out where they were.
Morgan spotted a pickup truck parked on the side of a nearby road and wandered toward it. The handlebars of several bikes were visible over the side wall of the truck bed. She peered in at the driver’s side, but the tinted windows prevented getting a good look. She tried the door handle and it opened. “Bloody hell!” She jumped back and covered her face.
Andy and Charlie ran towards her. Arriving first, Andy took one look inside the truck and recoiled. Morgan was already yards away, retching into the grass. Andy rushed over to her and pulled her long hair away from her face.
Meanwhile, Charlie inched toward the truck, his face contorted in an expression of horror. With one hand, he covered his nose. A horrendously decomposed body sat in the driver’s seat, the seatbelt still buckled over what remained of the person’s lap. It wasn’t a virus victim; there would have been nothing but the dry bones of a skeleton. This was a more recent death. Maggots crawled in and out of the mouth, nostrils, and other orifices. The state of decay of the corpse was such that Charlie could not determine its sex. Looking down beyond the torso, he noticed something else. “It’s got no legs!”
“What?” Andy called back. She returned to the truck and peered inside. Sure enough, there was nothing hanging below the edge of the seat. There was, however, a large pool of dried blood on the floor mat and a single shell casing from a bullet stuck to it. Pinching her nose, she reached inside and picked up the shell with her free hand while careful to avoid touching anything else.
“Maybe he—or she—killed themselves?” Charlie guessed.
“But how can you drive without legs?”
“Maybe a wild animal got inside after…it was already dead.”
Andy made a face at the gruesome suggestion and noted the open window in the back seat on the other side of the truck. “Something could’ve crawled in, but it wouldn’t have eaten the leg bones too.”
By now Morgan had recovered and was examining the contents in the open truck bed. “There’s four bikes back here. And a tire pump. And a gun of some kind,” she reported.
“Excellent!” Andy yelled back. “At least we won’t have to walk everywhere. Are there any bullets?”
“Yeah, looks like a few boxes.”
“Great. Now if only this truck starts and there’s gas, we’re in business.”
“Andy, I’m not riding in a truck that’s had a dead body rotting inside!” Morgan protested.
Ignoring her friend, Andy looked around and spotted a large tree branch resting in the grass by the road. She retrieved it and entered the truck through the passenger’s door. Using the thick end of the branch, she pushed the corpse out of the truck with a mighty shove as Charlie jumped out of the way before it hit the ground. She tossed the branch outside and leaned in further to discover that the keys were in the ignition. “It’s a stick shift. Charlie, press down on the clutch.”
Stepping around the corpse, he grabbed onto the doorframe and compressed the pedal with his right foot. Andy put the gear was in neutral and turned the key. After a lengthy turn over, the engine started. Her eyes immediately searched for the fuel gauge. “Thank God! There’s more than half a tank!”
“Yeah, and a bloody mess on the seat.” Charlie was looking down at where the corpse had been. The seat was covered in dried blood and looked as though it had been slashed with a blade many times.
“Oh, you big baby. We can cover the seat with a towel.”
Charlie grimaced but couldn’t deny the stupidity of passing up a functioning vehicle with more than a hundred miles of gas in it because of a little blood. “Okay, but you drive.”
“And I’m sitting in the back,” Morgan declared.
“Fine,” Andy conceded.
“What about the boat?” Charlie asked with concern. “What if this truck dies fifty kilometers down the road?”
“Well, then we can either bike back, or we’ll find another car or something. But we can’t stay on that boat forever.”
Morgan and Charlie looked at each other, uncertain.
“We can always come back, okay?” Andy reassured while examining the sky. Nightfall was approaching. “It’s too late to drive anywhere now, and since it doesn’t look like anyone’s coming by to steal our boat or much else, let’s head back for the night. We’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
“Okay.”
Before heading back to the boat, Andy glanced down at the corpse and wondered again about the missing legs but only for a moment. Just another dead body amongst the thousands she’d seen.
***
The smell of bleach had replaced the smell of human decay. Morgan had insisted on purging the truck of bloodstains and melted flesh and spent the first hour of the new day scrubbing the seats while Andy and Charlie unloaded their things off the boat.
Andy drove the entire way to Washington DC the following morning. There were just a few cars stranded in the middle of the highway as the city drew closer, but soon they increased to such a number that she was forced to weave between the vehicles, treating the highway like an obstacle course. At one point when the road became completely blocked, she rammed her way through them. Some of the abandoned cars were like coffins containing a skeleton or two, while others sat empty. The congestion worsened at the Capital Beltway that encircled the city. It was as though the virus had struck every driver dead at the exact same moment during the peak of rush hour traffic. A horrifying moment frozen in time.
“Charlie, get me off this road!” Andy cried in frustration.
Charlie deftly found their location on his roadmap. “Take this exit,” he pointed. It was a sign for another highway.
“Okay.” She pulled off the Beltway and onto I-395 where conditions improved. Her palms began to sweat as they crossed the Potomac River. She felt like they were becoming more and more trapped the closer they got to the city limits.
“Are you sure we want to keep going?” Morgan asked as though reading her friend’s mind.
Andy didn’t answer. She wiped each hand on her jean shorts.
“We’ve come this far. Might as well keep going,” said Charlie, trying to remain upbeat.
Off to her left, Andy saw the Washington Monument. “Charlie, can you get me there?” she said, gesturing toward the gray obelisk jutting sharply into the skyline.
He nodded and reexamined the map.
Morgan pressed her head against her window and stared at the monument. “At least it’s still standing,” she murmured.
When they reached the monument, Andy parked in front of the overgrown lawn surrounding its base. Morgan and Charlie followed as she walked toward the monument. The entire area was disturbingly quiet; not a soul or sign of life in sight.
Within yards of the visitor’s entrance, Andy stopped dead in her tracks. “What the—?”
The land where fifty American flags had once encircled the monument, flying proudly, was now covered in shredded pieces of fabric and flagpoles bent askew, some nearly horizontal. Graffiti covered the bottom few yards of the monument’s surface; mostly words and phrases that she could hardly decipher. Though the rest of the monument was devoid of graffiti, being too high for anyone to reach, the marble was dull and dingy.
“Who would do this?” Andy’s face was contorted into an expression of disgust.