They were in a third-floor apartment in a small residential block to the east of Stockton, California, just off Highway 88, close to the small township of Waterloo.

  The door was locked, and the steel safety bolt was slid across.

  In one corner of the neat, spare living room stood the two mountain bikes that had enabled Jed and Jeff to make such good progress north and west toward San Francisco.

  Finding them had been a big break of sheer good fortune. Six nights earlier they’d encountered a small estate of expensive-looking houses, perched high in the foothills. It was immediately obvious that others had also thought that they looked expensive and had visited them.

  Every door and most of the windows were broken, and anything worth stealing was gone. Five out of the block of nine had also been fired.

  The most comfortable place to spend the night was the double garage of the end house, and Jed and Jeff had slept there.

  Jed had woken first, stretching, looking out past the open door toward the opalescent light of early morning.

  At his side there was the already familiar snuffling grunts of Jeff, his nocturnal breathing plagued by his damaged nose.

  Jed had let his eyes wander upward.

  “Holy shit!”

  The scavengers had never lifted their rapacious gaze beyond the walls of the garage and had missed a pair of top-of-the-range mountain bikes. They were neatly slotted away in the shadows of the roof, custom-made Engessers. One gold and one a glittering silver.

  There had also been puncture-repair outfits and two sets of spare tires and tubes. With tool kits and everything you might need.

  Riding them with the heavy backpacks wasn’t easy, but they both found that the bikes were vastly better than walking. They could work up to an average of close to a hundred miles a day on level highway. And San Francisco was drawing ever closer.

  EVERY DAY THEY SAW MORE evidence of the horrors of a forced mass evacuation.

  Now, months later, it wasn’t possible to guess when the exodus from the coast had begun. But it was impossible to miss the dreadful mute evidence of the results of the catastrophe.

  The closer Jed and Jeff cycled to their destination, the more grateful they were for having the off-road bicycles.

  The main routes were soon impassable, blocked by hundreds upon hundreds of broken-down vehicles and trucks. Leaving them, the pair picked out a snaking route over obscure cutoffs and quiet, neglected blue highways.

  Past the silent legions of the dead.

  The desert scrub and slopes of the Sierras had all been tinted the palest of pinks, with the tops frosted by snow.

  All that was missing from the beautiful landscape was living people.

  They’d seen cats and dogs, including what looked ominously like a hunting pack of German shepherds on the far side of a fast-flowing river. Three times they’d seen bears and once a cougar loping across the track less than fifty yards in front of their wheels.

  It turned to favor them with a slit-yellow, contemptuous stare.

  “Doesn’t take long for the land to go back to the creatures who owned it first,” said Jeff.

  “It would make a good article, if only there were any papers to write for.”

  Every now and again there’d been a solitary human, keeping well out of their way. They also came across two more townships with barricades on the access roads. One was protected by armed men and women. The other guarded a deserted settlement of withered corpses.

  Only once did they see any larger groups of people, and that had been at a point where the freeway dipped down below the old narrow road they were pedaling along.

  Jed braked to a halt, standing astride the Engesser, swatting flies away from his face. “Will you look at that, Jeff?”

  “Reminds me of a squatters’ township in some dirt-poor Fourth World country.”

  Smoke rose from several places among shacks built from scrapped vehicles. The smell of roasting meat came flirting its way toward the two men.

  Fifteen or twenty ragged, filthy figures came slowly out into the sunlight to stare back at the invaders.

  Most of them held makeshift weapons, spears made from metal railings and crude bows and arrows.

  They stood in a sullen, close group, looking up at Jeff and Jed.

  The two men didn’t say anything to each other. In unison they simply turned, remounted their trail bikes and rode away.

  It was Jeff Thomas who finally broke their silence seven or eight miles farther west. “I’ve seen the future,” he said, his voice quiet above the humming of the tires. “And I have to tell you it doesn’t work.”

  JED HAD BEEN RIGHT. The chaos was unbelievable.

  Every road they came to was blocked by stalled and abandoned vehicles. Twice there’d been fires and hundreds of cars had been fused into a huge carbonized block of blackened metal, the heat of the fireball melting the highway itself.

  It was a quiet, beautiful October morning, and the still air was filled with the dry, brittle smell of death.

  The open ground on either side of the freeway was carpeted with corpses. Families lay together, embracing in death.

  Glinting among the dried corpses was the now-familiar sight of empty pill bottles. Green-and-brown glass, shining in the water sunlight like so many discarded jewels. The last resort of the starving and desperate refugees who had finally taken control of their destiny, choosing the time and place of their own deaths.

  The last freedom left to them.

  Jed and Jeff found the sight and stink of mass death so insidious, even months after the event, that they took a different route toward the city. They cut around to the north of Mount Diablo, finding fewer holdups that way.

  But they also discovered that the big San Andreas Fault had been at work. Over the years the fragile earthquake zone of central California had been increasingly active, with major jolts in both 2012 and 2027.

  It was Jed who drew the short straw.

  He was cycling a little ahead of his comrade, freewheeling down a steep, winding grade. Thoughts of caution and potential danger left him, with the exhilaration of the wind through his hair, the pavement unrolling beneath the wheels.

  He took both feet off the pedals, head back, whooping at the top of his voice.

  Leaning into the sharp curves, feeling the adrenaline rush of danger as the tires slithered on loose gravel, he was riding on the far edge of control.

  He never even saw the section of road where the fault had worked its malign magic, turning a fifty-yard stretch into a corrugated washboard with jagged cracks and humps.

  The bike left the ground, and he felt himself tumbling sideways. A moment of flying and then the impact. A grinding crash and a splintered vision… spinning sky and earth and sky and earth and earth.

  He could hear the faint sound of a wheel spinning and, somewhere, a bird singing.

  “Jed, you all right?”

  “Think so. Down here.”

  “I hit that road section. Fucked my front wheel and bent the frame. I came off.”

  “Yeah, me too.” Jed fell quiet, realizing that this was a foolish thing to say. “Guess you know that, Jeff.”

  “Saw you going for earth-break orbit. That was why I fell off. Lost concentration.”

  “Sorry. I’ll try and come off in a different sort of way.”

  Now he could focus. He had fallen fifty feet down a steep slope, his bike only a yard away from him. As he looked at it, the wheel stopped spinning.

  Jeff was standing above him, silhouetted against the skyline.

  “Want a hand?”

  “Yeah.” He checked out his vulnerable knees and felt the hilt of the kitchen knife digging into his hip and reached around to shift it. They’d both taken good blades from the first unlooted house they slept in. Not much use against rifles, but better than nothing.

  Jed’s had a narrow blade with a serrated edge to it. Jeff had picked a long, broader knife, honed so sharp it almost sang.

  It was a struggle to heave the bike up onto the buckled highway.

  They stood together, Jeff shaking his head. “Mine’s gone to buy the farm, Jed.”

  “Still if we’re lucky we can pick up another one. We’re close to tens of thousands of houses. They won’t all have taken their bikes with them when they upped and ran.”

  “Yeah. Guess so. Least we both got away with a scratch and a bruise.”

  Jed nodded, straightening the front wheel on his machine.

  The bullet came out of nowhere, ploughing a furrow in the pavement just to their left.

  “Behind us,” said Jeff, dropping to the ground, the bike tumbling beside him.

  They were near the crest of a hill, with the road sloping down ahead of them. The shot had come from the rising ground at their backs.

  “Look.” Jed pointed ahead, where he’d spotted a dozen dark figures scrambling agilely across the pink scrubland toward the highway. Setting up to cut them off from that avenue of escape.

  Another shot rang out, this time missing them by a wider margin.

  Jed looked at Jeff, holding on to the saddle of his bike then at the other machine, wrecked and unridable in the dirt.

  “It won’t carry two of us.”

  Jeff nodded. “Not with both our packs. Not even without them.” His voice was high and strained, the words tumbling over each other in their eagerness to escape from his mouth. “Won’t say sorry, as I’m not, Jed.”

  “What?”

  His head still whirling from the fall, Jed Herne found that life had suddenly become utterly, bizarrely inexplicable.

  Jeff Thomas had slugged him one, followed by a searing blow to his ribs, making him actually stagger a few steps, his fingers losing hold on the golden Engesser. But it was all right because Jeff had grabbed the crossbar and was holding it.

  Getting into the saddle.

  Another shot rang out, this time closer, kicking dirt and grit into his face as he lay on the highway. But he didn’t recall lying down.

  “I’m down, Jeff,” he said, wondering why his voice sounded so thin and far away. Like a cartoon voice. The thought made Jed smile.

  He opened his eyes, surprised to see that Jeff and the golden bike were gone. There was a gleaming blur, down the hill, toward the west.

  At least his knee wasn’t hurting at all, but he was feeling cold. And he had a pain in his ribs, like a small fire lighting up.

  There was the sound of feet running toward him and shouting. But Jed wasn’t concerned. He was far more involved with the mystery of his own dying.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Henderson McGill and Peter Turner were also carrying knives.

  Like Jeff and Jed, they’d taken them from an abandoned house, but they’d been luckier. In what looked like the bedroom of a teenage boy, with rock posters on the walls and skin magazines at the back of the closet, they came across a set of good-quality hunting knives.

  Steel hilted, with tempered nine-inch blades, double-edged and needle pointed.

  Both men had their weapons drawn as they walked cautiously along the main street of Hustonville. Pete’s Kawasaki was propped on its stand outside a small grocery store. Mac’s Norton was leaning against the wall of the Fluff ‘n’ Fold laundry next door.

  “Think the sign was a trap?” said Pete.

  “Paint was new, still sticky. And we need gas or we have to dump the bikes.”

  “Town’s dead as Dead McDead of Deadsville.” Pete looked round. “This could’ve been a hell of a good place once.”

  Hustonville looked as if it had been put together for a movie about a typical American small town. Single main drag, with a boardwalk, and a few side streets straggling off, with what must have been leafy sidewalks before the Earthblood virus struck. Now there were just irregular rows of dead tree trunks, bare white branches sticking jaggedly out at all angles.

  There were half a dozen stores, and an ancient building that would once have been the local cinema. But it had enjoyed its own last picture show sixty or seventy years ago and had been most recently a carpet salesroom.

  There was also Ed’s gas station. Only two pumps. One for unleaded and one, a rare sight nowadays, for leaded gasoline.

  The two men walked slowly and cautiously up and down the street, glancing along the intersections at the neat houses with picket fences and stone-dead gardens.

  There was a light wind blowing. Ma’s Diner had its window smashed in. On the far wall, above broken tables and chairs, a calendar was flapping, showing a faded view of Grand Rapids, Michigan. But all the dates had been torn off.

  “What day is it, Pete?”

  “Can’t you remember?”

  “No. You’re the second pilot. Should be your responsibility.”

  “You’re the astrophysicist, Mac.”

  “Right. Well, it’s October 10.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “If we’re getting up to your folks’, we gotta make some good time.”

  Mac nodded. “I know it, Pete.” He spat in the street. “And we’re getting short on the hi-concentrates. Have to find some food soon.”

  Pete hesitated, scuffing in the dust with the toe of his boot. “You sure you still want to try and make it north?”

  “See my family, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mac sighed. “Got to go. Way the world looks, I realize… no, I accept that the odds are they might be done for. But both Jeanne and Angel are tough ladies. If there’s any way of making it through the bad times, then they’ll have done it. And they’ll know that if I made it… that I’d come and find them. Doesn’t matter where or when, Pete. You understand that?”

  “Sure.”

  “But if you want to cut back, head for Calico for November 15, then…”

  Pete grinned. “Together we swim and alone we sink. Or some shit like that. Come on, let’s look a bit harder for this mysterious gasoline.”

  The small Episcopalian church stood on the grandly named Forrest Avenue, in reality a tiny, snaking lane with a dozen poor frame houses on it. The mummified corpse of a little baby lay on its steps.

  On a board by the church gate, weathered and torn, was a notice. The usual one, once a common sight outside a thousand churches across the land. A text from the Bible, intended to draw the reader’s attention to a serious contemporary problem of society.

  “Must’ve been the last one before the lemmings left for the high cliffs,” said Pete, staring thoughtfully at it.

  The warning was taken from the seventh chapter of Ecclesiastes, beginning with the first verse:

  The day of death is better than the day of birth. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting. For that is the end of all men and women. Sorrow is truly better than laughter. Better is the end of a thing, than the beginning thereof.

  “Cheerful,” said Mac.

  They redoubled their steps, then sat down on the sidewalk by their bikes, neither of them speaking.

  Mac was tossing a rounded sandstone pebble from hand to hand, whistling quietly to himself. Pete was cross-legged, palms flat on his thighs, in a version of the lotus position. His eyes were closed, and he hadn’t spoken for fifteen minutes.

  The voice came from above them. “You guys want some gas for them hogs? That why you stopped here in Hustonville?”

  Pete didn’t respond at all. Mac replied over his shoulder.

  “You got some for sale, lady?”

  “Maybe.”

  He was trying to judge the voice. Female, aged around fifty. Redneck kind of voice. Tough.

  “All right if we turn around?”

  The woman sounded surprised. “Course. Why not, mister. You got to look someone plumb in the face if’n you want to do a deal.”

  There were two women, standing on the rickety balcony above Ma’s Diner. The one doing the speaking was closer to sixty. Gray hair under a swallow’s-eye bandanna, thick glasses. The other was around twenty, also wearing spectacles. Short brown hair. Mac couldn’t see from down in the street if either of them was carrying a gun.

  “You got gas to sell?”

  “Sell?”

  “Sure.” He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a fistful of dollars. Two hundred dollars in tens and fives from his locker at Stevenson Base. Pete was finally taking notice, starting to stand up, coming out of his meditation.

  The younger woman said something, and the older one laughed.

  “What’s funny?” called Mac.

  Pete’s voice at his shoulder hardly even reached a whisper. “Two across the street. One in a hardware store, other in alley beyond.”

  The older woman answered him. “Daughter says we don’t lack paper to wipe our asses, mister. Money don’t buy happiness, my mother used to say. Now, after Earthblood, it doesn’t buy you a damn thing. What else you got to trade?”

  “Food?” called the younger one.

  Mac glanced at Pete. The sharp eyes beyond the thick lenses didn’t miss the movement.

  “We’re honest, mister. Two rifles trained on you across the way. We could easy have taken you both within two minutes of reaching town. Me and my three daughters. Laid you in the dirt.”

  “Why didn’t you?” asked Pete.

  “Not our way. That the way you two like to deal with folks?”

  “No.”

  “Since Earthblood come out of the north like Sherman on his way to the coast, we seen plenty of folks at first—a real flood of them. Most died. We hid out at a place out in the hills. Had us plenty of food then. The flood became a summer trickle, then the trickle turned drought dry.”

  The daughter chimed in. “You the first in six days. Or seven?”

  “We’ll trade some hi-concentrate food in our packs for gas.”

  “Sure you will.”

  A third voice came from over the street. “They don’t have guns, Ma. Unless they’re hideaways. Checked them with the scope. Both got knives is all.”

  The mother clucked. “Big motorbikes and no guns. You boys come from Greengrass Halt, Stupid County? If we weren’t honest, you’d be dead and we’d have the Kawasaki that needs plugs cleaning proper and that lovely old Norton, too.”

  “Can we deal?” shouted Mac. “We got us a long ways to go.”