Page 134 of The End of the World As We Know It
“I’m scared,” Ruby said. She drew her tattered sneakers onto the seat and hugged her knees. Elise thought she looked more weary than scared—or weary ofbeingscared, perhaps. The default disposition for this newly upended world.
The muscle car expanded in the rearview. Elise heard the throaty snarl of its V8 above the Chevette’s overworked whine. It swung into the oncoming lane and accelerated alongside them. Elise touched the brakes. The needle dipped to sixty-five and the muscle car roared ahead, then it slowed, drawing level again.
It wasn’t a Mustang or Barracuda. Elise had glimpsed the wordCORVIDon the trunk lid. She’d heard of a Corvette, of course, even a Corvair, but this model was new to her. The word itself—Corvid—evoked images of graveyards and bones. The car’s aesthetic offered nothing to contradict this, with its casket-like lines, its black paintwork and tinted glass.
Elise knew what was coming. She told Ruby to grab hold of something, then pressed her back into the driver’s seat and tightened her grip on the steering wheel.
The Corvid swerved right and thumped into them. The sound of colliding steel was tremendous—a resonant boom that rolled through every bone and fiber. The Chevette’s side mirror shattered and fell away in pieces. Ruby screamed. Elise veered onto the shoulder and lifted a ragged curtain of dust, then managed to correct her line and swing back into the right lane.
Sweat trickled into her eyes. She blinked it away, not daring to remove her hands from the wheel. The needle had dropped into theforties, but the Corvid remained alongside her, matching her speed. Its passenger-side window was open. Elise looked through it, expecting to see the driver: a crow-headed thing with pale blue eyes and tattooed arms. The car’s interior was too dark see anything, though. It was like staring into a well.
It slammed into them again, shattering one of the Chevette’s headlights. Broken glass flew over the hood and rattled off the windshield. The fender buckled, flapped briefly, and was ripped into the air like a mad, steel bird. A quivering sob escaped Elise’s chest as she wrestled the wheel to keep from spinning out. She hit the shoulder again and the back end fishtailed. For a moment, everything was lost in a cloud of dust. The Chevette emerged from it sideways, sliding across both lanes to the other shoulder. Elise steered into the skid, tapped the brakes, and got the car under control.
She’d slowed to thirty-five. The Corvid was ahead of her, low and predatory, weaving from one side of the road to the other.
Ruby was crying. She looked up over her knees, her wet eyes glimmering through the tangled threads of her hair.
“What does hewant?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Elise replied, and this was true. Clearly, the Corvid’s driver had only bad intentions. Would he drag her back to El Centro and the life she had run away from? Or did he have something worse in mind? Elise had seen such things. She’d passed a young family hanged by their necks from overhead lines along a back road west of Yuma. Daddy was a big guy and had a line to himself. Still, it drooped V-shaped with the weight of him. Their station wagon—a bumper sticker on its rear end that readPOWERED BY JESUS—lay skewed in a ditch, its cargo area ransacked. Farther along, she’d passed a mesquite strung with severed human heads.
There was a knapsack on the back seat packed with a few of Elise’s belongings: clothes, a framed photograph of her mother, a spare pair of shoes, a couple of paperback novels, and a small bag bulging with toiletries and cosmetics. There was also a semiautomatic pistol in .45ACP—a long-slide Hardballer. Jason’s handgun, of course. The only thing of his she’d taken. The only thing she’d wanted. Unfortunately, this was not an option. There’d been four rounds in the Hardballer’s mag, but she’d used them all at Cactus Belle’s Trading Post.
The road ran crooked to the horizon, like a broken bone that had healed wrong. Vultures rode the updrafts in patient circles, while smaller birds scattered from the cover of shrubs and trees. There was nothing in any direction but the Sonoran hardpan, sewn with palo verde, ironwood, and other flashes of color. The gray outlines of ridges and mesas wavered in the heat haze.
Staying on 219, the Corvid would soon get the better of them. Elise saw only one course of action.
“Hold on,” she said to the girl.
Elise cranked the wheel right and the Chevette careened off the road, bouncing across the desert proper with everything banging and shaking. Dust rose in a smoke-like cloud. Grit rattled through the wheel arches. Elise glanced over her shoulder and saw the Corvid’s brake lights flare. Its back end swung around, then it, too, departed the road and raced across the desert in pursuit.
It was unpredictable terrain. She could clip a tree and flip, slide into a gulch, front-end a boulder. The same was true for the Corvid, however. Going off-road was a desperate course of action, but Elise had somewhat leveled the playing field.
Fifty… sixty miles per hour. Rocks bounced off the chassis with bullet-like velocity and the constant sound of them enveloped Ruby’s frightened groans. Elise tore through creosote bush and desert lavender. She hit a rise going sixty-five and the Chevette was airborne for a full second. It landed loudly and jounced. The trunk popped open and closed with a furious thump.
The Corvid made easier work of the landscape. It swerved around the various obstacles, gradually gaining. It hit the same rise and caughtmore air. Every now and then it would disappear inside the wall of dust following Elise, only to reemerge closer.
“He’s going to catch us,” Ruby cried.
“I won’t let that happen,” Elise said.
She had left her apartment that morning with a clear idea of where she was going. It was as if some invisible cell door had been unlocked and rolled open. To feel free—emancipated—in a time of such pain and grief had not rested easy on her soul, but it hadn’t stopped her from liberating this old car from her neighbor’s garage and heading east out of town. She’d found a map in the glove box and charted a route to Nebraska, keeping to the secondary roads because she believed they’d be quieter and therefore less dangerous.
Five hours later, with one hundred and eighty miles behind her, Elise had a revised destination:Away. Nebraska’s big sky had been eclipsed by something bigger yet, and arguably not a destination at all. There were no buildings in Away, no streets or people or lush green cornfields. Elise yearned for it, all the same—to be away from this desert with its dry death and heat, and away from this muscle car and every godless thing it represented.
She recalled the young family strung up by their necks and felt a deep stitch of grief, even though she never knew them. Tears spilled from her eyes. She tightened her grip on the wheel and kept moving.
Now the ground dipped sharply, punctuated by greasewood and granite boulders, rounded like the shoulders of praying men. Elise deaccelerated to navigate this change in the terrain. She threaded a gap between two such boulders with the Corvid just a beat behind, then steered around a magnificent tangle of deadwood: trees that had inched together across millennia and died in one another’s arms. The ground leveled out on the other side and Elise jumped on the gas again. She checked her mirrors and saw the Corvid roaring up on her left, lifting a black cloud of dust.
Both cars swung right to avoid a towering saguaro. Only the seat belt kept Ruby from sliding off her seat and into Elise’s lap. The girl’s expression was heartbreaking. She felt things no child should ever have to feel. She’d lost everything and the abyss it left behind was in her eyes and her trembling chest and in the shape of her mouth. If the plague’s impact could be captured in a single image, it would be of this nine-year-old girl.
The Corvid pulled level and Elise stifled a scream. She’d thought it was black dust, but it was smoke pouring out through the open windows, as if whatever was behind the wheel was on fire.
Elise hit the brakes. She turned the wheel and changed direction, fishtailing between more saguaros and ripping through dry brush and shrubs. Jackrabbits scattered in all directions, their distinct black tails ticking. She lost the Corvid for several blissful seconds, then it reappeared in the rearview. It came up fast and thumped her back end. It sounded, and felt, like a small IED had detonated in the trunk, which popped open again, badly dented. A long crack bisected the rear windshield. The Chevette lurched and shimmied, but Elise maintained control. The Corvid moved in again, accelerating hard. Elise watched it in the rearview. She steered right at the last second and avoided the attack by a matter of inches.
The terrain dipped again, descending into a narrow arroyo, its bed littered with detritus, mostly sticks and plant matter, but bones, too—animals washed away and drowned by flash floods. It all sounded the same beneath the Chevette’s tires. Elise rode this dry chute and the Corvid kept pace, rumbling along the top of the bank to her left. It was still smoking. Ahead, the arroyo grew narrower yet and turned sharply. The apex of this bend was clogged with a fallen tree trunk and anEXITsign lifted from the roadside by some long-ago storm. It jutted from the sandy bed with its arrow, ominously, pointing down. Elise pumped the brakes and the Chevette went sideways, slidingover the sticks and bones. Its rear quarter panel slammed against the sign with a jarring clang. She worked the wheel and got around the obstruction, then climbed out of the arroyo on the other side.
They emerged onto flatter ground. Elise rammed her sneaker to the floor and the needle climbed from thirty to sixty. Something rattled behind the car, and it took her a moment to realize it was the muffler, hanging by a single bracket.
