THE NEXT DAY. ON THE I-64 BRIDGE ON THE WABASH, JUST SOUTH OF GRAYVILLE, ILLINOIS. 7:15 AM CST. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2025.
The Wabash is
immense—the French explorers originally thought of the Wabash as
the main stream and the upper Ohio as a tributary—and the twin
bridge over I-64 was more than half a mile long; both bridges were
choked with wrecked cars and trucks. Roger had started to cross
with an hour of darkness remaining, but the sun had been full up
for a while and he was still working his way forward from hiding
place to hiding place, trying to stay away from the visible edges
of the bridge.
Now that he could see
the rest of his way, he hated to come out from cover, but there
were just a few more rows of cars to go to the jackknifed semi
that, on the morning of October 29, 2024, had blocked two lanes of
traffic when its tires all burst, leaving hundreds of cars stuck on
the bridge to wait for a state trooper who never came, their tires
rotting and bursting, gasoline fermenting into unburnable vinegar,
electrical systems encrusted with nanoswarm.
There was a crunching
sound under his feet, and splashes in the river below; he darted
away from the place where the sealant between the steel web deck
and the crumbled and dried blacktop had decayed and broken away,
sending a mass of gravel into the Wabash below.
He crouched beside an
old rusted Honda Citiscoot; a half dozen bumper stickers, their
glue rotted, lay by its rear bumper.
When nothing moved or
made a sound after fifteen minutes, Roger rose to take a look
around.
Pressed against the
passenger-side window, inches from his face, a mummified child
looked back at him. The lips had pulled back from the teeth as it
had dried, and the eyes had fallen in, but the Spider-Man T-shirt
still hung from the bony shoulders, and the hand stuck in the
rotting plastic of the door sill seemed about to reach for
Roger.
The driver-side
window had a bullet hole in it. The long-haired mummy slumped on
the wheel was draped in a partly decayed sweatsuit. A tiny
shriveled body lay in a puddle of pudding-like slime, which must
once have been a baby carrier, in the back seat.
Roger charged down
the highway at a dead run; terrible tradecraft, and he wasn’t sure
what he was running from, but nothing pursued him, and in a minute
or so, he was among the trees, beside a ditch full of water,
watching minnows and listening to the birds. He ate some jerky,
drank from his canteen, and lay back to look at the
sky.
Had someone been
shooting at the bridge at random? Crazy guy walking through the
traffic jam with a pistol? Her ex-husband seeing his chance? Stray
round from a gunfight between two stranded drug dealers over a
briefcase of money?
With Daybreak
remains, you could break your brain, and your heart, trying to
understand how someone had happened to die that way.
He slept for an hour
or so, woke feeling better, and cautiously advanced along the
ditch, still headed east.