Page 140 of Whistle
violators will be arrested and prosecuted
by order of the vermont state police
Annie hadn’t finished reading that piece in theTimesshe’d found on her phone, but she was willing to bet the entire town was an environmental no-go. While the chlorine gas in the air would have eventually dissipated, whatever liquids had leaked out of those derailed tanker cars could have leached down into the ground and poisoned the town’s water supply.
All of which suggested that there was nothing going on in the town’s center, and no reason for Charlie to be there. Would there have been a way for him to have made it through this barrier? Maybe there were gaps somewhere, or access into the town from another direction.
Annie left the engine running as she got out of the car and walked up to the gate. It was secured in the middle by a chain and lock. Annie gave it a tug, on the off chance it hadn’t been secured, but there was no luck there.
She went back to the car and took a look at the map on the dashboard navigation screen. She moved it around with her fingers, looking for another way in. There were two other roads that led into Lucknow from the other side, and it would take a long time for her to get to them, only to find that they’d be padlocked, too.
Annie took a deep breath. She could think of only one way to get this done.
She didn’t want to set off the car’s airbags by hitting the gate with the front end of the car, so she did a three point-turn so that she was looking at the gate in her rearview mirror. She wanted to get a good run at it, so she drove forward about twenty yards, stopped, moved the gearshift from forward to reverse, grabbed hold of the steering wheel as firmly as she could with both hands, lining the car up with the center of the gate, took her foot off the brake, and tromped on the accelerator.
The car’s wheels squealed, the engine roared.
Gritting her teeth, preparing herself for the impact, Annie had the car doing at least thirty miles per hour by the time she hit the gate.
Her scream was drowned out by the sound of the chain snapping, the two halves of the gate swinging back and scraping along the pavement, the car’s bumper and tailgate taking a hit. For half a second, Annie wondered whether her insurance would cover this, and she almost laughed. She’d had her eyes locked on the mirror, but now she looked forward to a view of the buckled gate from the other side.
“Fucking-A,” she said to herself, hitting the brakes and bringing the car to a stop.
Any other time, she might have gotten out and had a look at the damage she’d done to her car, but right now she didn’t give a shit.
She turned the SUV around and headed into downtown Lucknow.
Fifty-Two
Annie was thinking, the cliché’s alwaysIt looked like something out of a movie.But damned if it didn’t look like something out of a movie.
She and John had watched a lot of movies and TV together, and end-of-the-world shows were a favorite. Films likeDawn of the Dead,28 Days Later,I Am Legend,The Road, television fare likeThe Walking DeadandThe Last of Us. Empty streets, at least until the zombies came out from around a corner.
Who needed zombies? Annie thought. What had really happened here was scary enough.
She was driving into a town where history stopped twenty-three years ago. More than four thousand souls had once lived here. Grown up, gone to school, fallen in love, raised families, headed off to work every morning. Made friends, got drunk, bickered, shopped, had sex in the back of cars, played Frisbee, met over coffee. Four thousand people who together made up a community, a complex living and breathing organism.
And in a matter of minutes, it was all over.
But unlike, say, if a nuclear bomb had been detonated, the structures remained, except for those closest to the derailment. The town was intact, but had endured more than two decades of neglect.
As Annie drove slowly through the streets, the evidence was everywhere. Front yards that were once well tended were now essentially fields, lawns that had grown into two-foot-tall grasses and weeds. Some houses were hard to distinguish because they’d become completely overgrown with vines and moss, cocooned. Shingles were curled up or missing from rooftops. Weeds sprouted through pavement cracks in the middle of the road. Bits and pieces of trash blew about.
Windows were boarded up on some homes, but smashed in on others, shredded drapes still hanging from the rods, drifting idly in the breeze. Annie saw a mangy dog leap out of one home’s glassless picture window, a rabbit between its teeth.
Off to the side of one house, a child’s swing set was nearly swallowed up by tall grass. Annie surmised the city was without power, given the number of dropped lines that crisscrossed the roads, the absence of any working traffic lights.
“Christ!” she shouted, and hit the brakes.
In the middle of the road, directly ahead of her, was a moose.
The beast was unruffled by Annie’s presence. It gave Annie a disinterested look, then strolled majestically past her car, its left antler passing within a couple of inches of her window.
What Annie might have expected to see more of were abandoned cars—if this were a real disaster movie, they’d be all over the place—but there were relatively few. Those were probably reclaimed by extended family or insurance companies, although she did see an old pickup truck parked at the curb as she started coming into the downtown business area. Who would want to buy a used car from a town where everyone died? Annie supposed if the price was right...
She could see a more dense cluster of buildings ahead, what would most likely be the downtown area. But she wasn’t going to be able to get to it in her car, as a once-towering oak tree that must have been downed during a storm sometime since 2001 blocked her path.She’d have to go on foot; there was a gap between the road and the tree she’d be able to duck under.
So she stopped the car, killed the engine, and, with more than a little trepidation, opened her door and got out.
