DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 12, SECTION 10

The guard who'd let us through the checkpoint had been right. Things outside Muldoon were bad.

Really bad.

Even when we reached the highway, there were practically no other cars on the road at all. Stage threes, on the other hand, were everywhere. Wandering under overpasses, clustering tirelessly at rest stops, and screwing in abandoned McDonalds parking lots. Many of them, though, had already expired. Bodies lay everywhere. The smell in the some of the towns we passed through was almost unbearable.

Ian, weakening and already exhausted from our ordeal at the checkpoint, feebly relinquished driving duties to Chris.

"I'm sorry," Ian said. "I want to help, but I can barely keep my hands on the wheel."

"No worries, dude. Medically speaking," Chris reasoned, "you're still starving! Takes weeks to recover from something like what you put yourself through."

Ian grumbled, but he fell asleep in the back almost immediately.

When we reached Denver, Chris passed right by the exit for downtown.

"Uh . . . Chris? You paying attention? That was Denver."

"We're not going to Denver."

"Well," I reasoned, "big city? High population? Isn't that what we're looking for? I know you're not from around here, but we'd have to go a long way before we got to anything bigger than Denver."

Chris laughed. "Exactly."

"Okay? Where are we going then?"

"We need to go to a major international city, Ash. Denver won't cut it. If we want to spread TGVx globally fast, we need a place, number one, with a diverse multi-national population, and, number two, where people have a ton of sex."

"Okay, so Salt Lake City's out. Where then?"

"New York."

Chris accelerated past the last Denver exit.

"Buckle up kids," he said. "It's gonna be a long drive."

We took turns sleeping in the camper so we never had to stop driving for more than a few minutes. Chris estimated we'd reach New York City right about the time when all the TGVx parasites had fled my dad's amygdala into his honey-blood, making it ready, he explained, to dilute with as many as millions of gallons of injectionable fluid.

How, exactly, we were going to both dilute the honey and treat positives on a mass scale was still a very fuzzy part of the plan. That, Chris said, we would just have to figure out when we got there. 

Most of the gas stations were totally shut down, but we were able to syphon enough fuel from abandoned cars along the way. Food was scarce, but we found enough canned goods still sitting on otherwise empty grocery store shelves. I took this to mean that stage threes had lost the necessary intelligence to open a tin can. I also took it to mean that there weren't very many people left who weren't infected or who were still at stage one or two.

I tried not to be too disheartened. Every time we passed a car on the highway, I felt a little hope for humanity; stage threes couldn't drive, so this meant that at least we weren't the only ones left.

Somewhere just east of the Mississippi River, I finally took a turn to sleep in the camper. Ian was already in one of the two bunks, sleeping silently as we rolled steadily down the highway through the night.

When I woke at dawn, Ian was already awake, silently watching the road pass by out the window. He'd made coffee at the little kitchenette, and when he saw me awakening, he offered me a cup.

"Ash," he said quietly, staring into his own coffee. "There's something I've been wanting to say to you."

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