The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [66]
A siren from town erupted in deep, low tones. It blew nearly too low to hear, but I felt the rumble of it deep in my hips, and it took miles of driving before the vibration released.
The quarantine with its poisonous children was behind me.
In my rearview mirror no cars followed, nobody traveling north. Everyone else fleeing town had peeled off west, south, and I had the road to myself. The view was mostly washed out by the winter air, but outside of Van Buren a trail of smoke ripped through the sky. Somebody’s flare from some road somewhere, maybe.
I drove until I slumped exhausted against the steering wheel and the car crunched to a stop in a gravel swell. I awoke with salty, warm blood in my mouth and drove on, sometimes following roads that were so broad, so ill defined, it seemed I was traveling through a vast parking lot.
This was far from home already, along the northern vein toward Albany. In my life I had not driven this far north. This must be what birds feel when they look down on the world and find the entire landscape new. Suddenly they’ve flown into a strange place where even the wind is foreign on their bodies, a wind so thick it’s like a person. He’s mauling you and you can’t move. Everything is different. The buildings, the earth below, the wires bisecting streets into broken pieces of stone.
My maps were old, drawn for a louder world, and it sickened me to even consider them.
The road grew over the curb, threatened the grass. As I gained distance north, the road leaked into the woods, spreading over hills, a blanketing of asphalt. I could not leave the highway. The rumors about this region were true. Even the hills were made of road. I pulled over, but found only more road to clear, and no matter how far I pulled over I only entered new parts of highway, which spilled in every direction. It was not safe to slow down. More cars joined me now, humming past in reckless vectors, a traffic without lanes, drivers staring at the hardened space ahead.
I held fast to what seemed a straight line and did my best to focus.
By noon the road eased into a slushy grass, and I drove faster, the wet soil like a wake of water beneath me. I crossed Allamuchy, where trees enclosed the roadway in a dark tunnel, violated by shards of light so blinding they seemed to throw white rocks in my path on the highway.
A fine green grass covered the countryside here, blown flush to the soil by the volley of speeding cars. Whole meadows leaned over at once as if some great airplane roared overhead. Outside of Corning a thin geyser of mud shot from the earth, whining into the air before stalling at its peak of flight, then falling in streaks to the ground. I do not know for how long I pushed forward. With my windows sealed the world passed by in silence, and such conditions made it almost impossible to mark the passing of time.
At intersections the stop signs had been effaced, caked in metallic red paint. Road signs and city distances had likewise been distorted. Most public writing, issuing basic commands to drivers, had been camouflaged. The bright, hammered slabs of road signs still hung from their posts, but they were wordless blocks of color that commanded no action.
Wherever the epidemic stood north of town, no one was taking any chances. If there had been any language in the countryside, it had now been systematically erased.
I saw no real writing for hours. Such conditions suited me fine.
At a county border marked by a heap of rope, a man on a ladder disguised a road sign, adding marks to the letters until they flowered out of meaning. The word looked to have once been Rochester.
That such a word once meant something seemed now only to be an accident.
I drove on. Before checkpoints I slowed. With one of Claire’s hospital masks I wiped the warm leakage from my eyes. No one questioned me.
Somebody wept inside a clouded