Part Nine

"You don't know what you're looking for
Coming right now knocking at your door
Surrender, pretender, bow down now on your knees and pray
You don't know what you're looking for."
-Econoline Crush, "You Don't Know"

The remainder of the morning and the largest portion of the afternoon were spent gathering supplies. Standard trade was long gone, as shop owners became to sick or scared to open the shops themselves, and the fractional remainder of the population simply raided for their needs. Cordelia and Lindsey were only making themselves a part of the overwhelming trend. Outside of a camping store that advertised everything from tents to concentrates, Lindsey scouted about until he found a brick that had already been used in the fine art of breaking and entering at least once. He reared back with a familiarity that made Cordelia think he had surely played baseball in high school or college, hurling the brick forward and shattering the glass, creating a satisfying stain on the stillness. It faded away much too soon.

Lindsey stepped carefully over the remaining glass, extending his hand back to help Cordelia. She gave them both a mild shock by taking it. "What do we need?" she asked, getting herself resettled and peering about at the semi-darkness.

Lindsey stepped further into the store, brow furrowing as his eyes ran across the shelves. "Tents and sleeping bags, unless you want to sleep in the truck." Cordelia made a face and shook her head. "Bottled water, canned food." Lindsey poked at a shelf full of packaged food concentrates; it was his turn to make a face. "We'll save this stuff for emergencies. Penicillin if the pharmacies haven't been gutted already. We're getting a later start than most of the people heading out."

Cordelia ignored the note of reproof in Lindsey's voice and asked, "You think one of us is going to get pneumonia?" She looked over her shoulder as she dragged a pair of sleeping bags off the shelves.

"Infection." Lindsey held up his wrist, allowing scar tissue to gleam angry and pink for the briefest of seconds before he returned it to its proper place tucked self-consciously against his side. "I was terrified that this was going to turn even nastier."

"Oh." Cordelia threw another look over her shoulder, longer and more measuring. "You hid it pretty well." She rejected the original pair of sleeping bags for two with heavy goose down stuffing. Seemed the city girl knew a thing or two about camping, after all. Or maybe she was just taking the two that would have been the most expensive, Lindsey thought, cutting off the respect before it could become too intrusive.

Cordelia was already working down the aisles in search of their next necessity. She paused in front of a stack of K-rations, pursing her lips. "These look nasty, do we actually need any of them?"

"Couldn't hurt," Lindsey said. "I had an uncle who was in the military. He kept a bunch of them in his truck in case it broke down on a back road. You get far enough into the boonies and God only knows when another car will go by. They're edible enough, good quick energy if you can stomach a lot of salt and grease."

Cordelia's face remained doubtful, but her tone was game as she replied. "Are you kidding me? Those are the great American foodstuffs." Cordelia grabbed an armful and dumped them into the pile they were creating. Coming back, she gave Lindsey a look that made him feel for a moment as though she were reading every thought in his head. Her tone, however, held a note of reluctant respect rather than horror as she said, "You're good at this survival thing."

Lindsey shrugged, and the gesture was tighter than he would have liked. "Grew up in the country," he said. "Comes with the territory." Doubly so if you grew up in the country and happened to be piss-poor at the same time.

Cordelia either didn't hear the shortness in his tone or was choosing to ignore it. Lindsey's less charitable instincts, admittedly the majority, were pointing towards the latter. "Really? Where?"

"Oklahoma." Lindsey stalked off towards the tents rather than look Cordelia in the face. "It was a long time ago." Cordelia took the hint, finally, and rustled some packages rather than follow him.

The tents were displayed at the far end of the store, giving him a good amount of time to calm down before he got there. Lindsey paused among the forest of nylon and canvas, resting his forehead against a shelf and feeling his jaw clench and unclench beyond his control. If Cordelia hadn't known where to find all his buttons before, she certainly did now. 'Way to put your weaknesses on parade, Lin.' Lindsey sighed and dragged his hand over his face, feeling the rasp of stubble against his palm. First chance that he got, he was picking up another razor to replace the one abandoned at Cordelia's apartment. Bad enough that eh was behind the wheel of his brother's hand-me-down truck again and watching his wardrobe make its return to t-shirts and jeans, there wasn't a power in the universe that could make him take up the time-honored McDonald tradition of going unshaven for days at a time. Not even an apocalypse.

Lindsey searched amongst the tents until he found one small enough to be set up without too much fuss and large enough to afford some measure of comfort. Finding the tent was easy, wrangling it down another matter entirely. Lindsey curled his remaining fingers into the seams of the cardboard, tugging it from the shelf and attempting to catch it in the crook of his bad arm as it fell. His aim was off and the edge of the box caught against flesh newly healed and unprepared for abuse. Pain like knitting needles being driven into his skin flared all the way into his shoulder. Lindsey jerked back and swore, bringing his box and several others besides onto the floor. The racket echoed through the aisles.

Though Cordelia had to have heard the commotion, she raised no cry of alarm or concern from the front of the store. The gratitude that Lindsey felt towards her for her discretion only made it worse. Frustration s thick it was choking rose in Lindsey's throat and he kicked at one of the boxes, relishing the dent he made and the way it skittered across the floor as though it were running from him. He panted, feeling for a moment as though the walls were trembling and about to fall in, and the vow made weeks before felt more like a noose than a lifeline.

Cordelia was kneeling by the supplies, her lips moving silently as she counted, when Lindsey returned several minutes later, a tent under his arm. She raised her eyes to him. The legitimate concern there nearly set Lindsey off all over again. "Hi." Her voice was so soft that Lindsey had to strain to hear it, threaded through with a terrible kindness.

The blood still pounded hot enough in Lindsey's ears to make reason a tenuous goal. He set the tent box down with exaggerated care. "I don't like to talk about what it was like at home."

Cordelia shrugged and returned her gaze to her counting. "No big deal." She was a better actress than most sources gave her credit for; the only thing that betrayed her was the line of tension in her neck. "When I was a kid, I wished I could run off to live in the country." She glanced up to catch the full force of Lindsey's stare. "No, really. I read Anne of Green Gables when I was, like, twelve. Puberty was much easier when I could fantasize about taking off and hiding whenever I had a fight with my parents." Cordelia flashed him a smile. "Until I discovered the joys of taking off across a mall with Daddy's AmEx, anyway."

Lindsey made a soft sound that was half snort, half reluctant laugh and, unbelievably, felt a measure of the tension bleeding out of him. "Anne was far too girly for me. Huck Finn all the way."

Cordelia's grin was dazzling enough to send an arrow straight into his gut. "Good to know I'm traveling with a frontiersman." She finished her counting. "I'm going to start tossing this stuff into the back of the truck."

"There are a few more things I need to grab, then I'll help you." Cordelia nodded and began to gather supplies into her arms. Lindsey watched for a moment, his nerves tingling with an odd note of anxiety. The old order of things had been swept away; it was the ultimate clean slate. He and Cordelia could simply bypass Lindsey's original plan altogether, head straight for Nebraska without any detours along the way. She could go right on believing in whatever it was she saw in him.

Except that nobody knew the power of a contract better than Lindsey did. He had promised the Dark Man a seer ('Dark Man, Walkin' Dude, Hardcase, he has many names, Lindsey, and you know that the only one which matters is damnation.'), and seer he would deliver to him. Anything that happened afterwards was none of Lindsey's concern.

Survival of the fittest, and Lindsey didn't think he was imagining the gorge that rose in his throat.

Bile wasn't the only thing that rose into Lindsey's esophagus when Cordelia's shriek rose from the front of the store. Lindsey forced his heart back down into his ribcage and sprinted through the aisles. He tried to tell himself that it had been 'Cordelia' and not 'Cordy' that he had mumbled beneath his breath in the first moments between panic and action.

Cordelia was sitting on the sidewalk outside the store, surrounded by glittering shards of glass like diamonds around a queen. Her expression completed the image of furious, injured royalty. Cordelia's breath came in pants and she was clutching the largest portion of glass in her hand. Ruby rivulets trickled, serpentine, down the skin of her wrist. Lindsey didn't think that she noticed. She jumped when she heard Lindsey's footsteps, scrabbling to her feet and dropping the glass as if she had caught herself holding something dead and half-rotted.

Cordelia started to swipe her hair back with her injured hand, grimaced, and dropped it back to her side. The drops of blood that splattered across her jeans gleamed very dark in the sunlight. "Son of a bitch," she spit, and Lindsey realized that emotional alchemy was already turning fear into anger. "Did you see that?"

"I was in the store," Lindsey said, drawing to a halt and giving her an once-over. Physically, the wound to her hand seemed to be the worst of it. Psychologically, he was not so sure, not after what she had done the night before. 'And it's none of your concern, anyway. Focus.'

"Tried to rob me." The sound of her laugh was reedy, bitter, and told Lindsey everything that he needed to know. "As if I have anything that he couldn't break into a store and get on his own." The corner of Cordelia's mouth was bleeding, but Lindsey decided that this would be a bad time to mention it. Cordelia stared at the stains on her jeans as if she had never seen anything like them before. "God, I hate this world." Her voice quavered for only a second before being overtaken by an ice that Lindsey was more familiar with in his own. The bruises on her throat had darkened to the color of twilight.

As soon as the chance presented itself, Lindsey picked up a handgun.

---
Cordelia understood now why there was so little chaos marking the streets.

Acres upon acres of gleaming metal stretched before them, covering the highway from bumper to bumper like steel cockroaches. Cordelia doubted that it was possible to wedge a bicycle between the vehicles, let alone Lindsey's truck. The stench of death that had been largely absent before was overpowering, sickly-sweet like rotting candy. Cordelia rolled down the window in case she needed to vomit.

"Jesus," Lindsey breathed from the driver's seat. His face had gone the color of raw linen.

"He doesn't seem terribly interested in us at the moment, no." Cordelia leaned out the window and craned her neck. "How far do you think it goes?"

Lindsey shrugged. The outburst of anger or disappointment that Cordelia was expecting from him had yet to make its appearance. "Miles, most likely." He imitated Cordelia's gesture in order to better see over the crush. "Looks like our golden boys in the military were doing more than just dealing with bodies. What do you want to bet there's a nice, far roadblock waiting for us up there? Or was?"

Cordelia slid back into the cab. "But that doesn't make any sense," she said. "Captain Trips was all over the national news, never mind how sanitized the stories were. Why go to the bother of enforcing a quarantine that they knew was going to be useless?"

"Sometimes it's not the secret that matters, but the act of keeping it," Lindsey said.

Cordelia pressed her lips into a thin line and didn't look at him. "Not everyone's like that."

Lindsey turned his head and smiled at her. When Lindsey smiled for the act itself rather than to cajole or wound, he was beautiful. Cordelia decided that she hadn't seen him smile that way nearly enough. "No," he said, "not all." There was a raspy note to his voice that made Cordelia's stomach muscles tighten. She looked away.

Silence fell across the cab. Lindsey took his hand off the steering wheel, running it through his hair and letting the breeze that came through the open windows tease the sweat off the back of his neck. Getting long. Holland would not approve. The corners of Lindsey's mouth quirked, threatening to turn into a grin that would destroy the careful picture of affability. Holland was an anonymous corpse moldering in the gutter while he, Lindsey, was alive and calling his own shots. That thought alone was nearly enough to jettison Lindsey's doubts straight into the grave along with the old man.

'I wouldn't call serving the hardcase calling your own shots.' Lindsey had been ignoring that purely interior voice for years. It was amazing how much easier it got with the passage of time.

"Now, what we have here is a problem," Lindsey said, allowing a hint of drawl to curl through his voice like honey through tea. "And I, for one, will choke before I spend another night in this city."

"Amen." Cordelia's face was uncertain as she said it, but a touch to the bruises on her neck smoothed out the wrinkles. She dropped her hand back into her lap.

"So what we need here is a solution." Lindsey remembered making this trip in reverse a decade before, armed with this truck, a scholarship, and a slit-eyed determination not to do it again. One of the few promises that he had managed to keep-to himself or anyone else-since leaving the red dirt behind him. Trips back home since then had been few and far between, made on increasingly plush airlines. Cordelia, still staring over the dead vehicles, missed the flat note in Lindsey's voice, certainly didn't catch the sagging in his face and shoulders. Reading choices or not, Cordelia was still a city girl. She didn't understand that Mother Nature had teeth and, without human wardens to maintain her crisscross muzzle of asphalt, metal, and plastic any longer, she was going to be far more eager to use them.

'He'll have to find another way,' Lindsey thought, not knowing if it was relief, fear, or defiance that straightened his spine. Most likely a combination of all three. 'He'll have to find someone else.' And Lindsey's lips crooked into a smile, far more bitter and real than the one that had charmed Cordelia moments before. Well, now. That changed the power dynamics a bit, didn't it?

The stone hanging beneath Lindsey's shirt, cool no matter how long it lay against his skin, became ice that bit and tore. Lindsey grit his teeth and bent over, clutching at the stone as its temperature dropped so fiercely that it felt as though the surrounding skin was going to slough off. A car horn flared. Lindsey barely heard it, and could not have said if it came from him leaning against the truck's or from somewhere else. Cordelia yelled his name.

'I want what I want what I want what I want.'

Cold became heat quickly enough to pull a hiss, cry of pain smothered too swiftly to escape as anything else, from his lips. It took Lindsey several more seconds to realize that the stone was as cool as it ever was, and only seemed warm now by comparison. Lindsey straightened, twigged to the fact that the car horn was being caused by his own forearm lying across the wheel, and pulled away. His ears rang in the stillness.

Cordelia looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes widened to nearly the size of hubcaps. There was a line between her eyes, a tension to her shoulders that hadn't been there seconds before. She held his gaze for long enough to make Lindsey wonder if he had spoken anything that he would regret before she turned away.

Or, more likely, she was concerned by the lemon yellow Hummer that had pulled up on the other side of the guardrail, the idling of its engine one of the only sounds breaking the afternoon. One of the largest men that Lindsey had ever seen honked the horn and waved at them. The cold that spread from Lindsey's scalp down into his shoes had nothing to do with amulets.

In other words, problem solved.

Cordelia broke off staring at the Hummer long enough to give him another look, her eyes clear and searching. Lindsey could see the questions that buzzed on her tongue, could just as clearly see himself giving her every one of the answers. .

'Do you hear that? I could spoil your party right now.'

If the conduit was still open, then the Dark Man didn't care enough to answer.

The man driving the Hummer, who resembled nothing so much as Santa Claus in late middle age, flung open the driver's door and scrambled down with the joy of a puppy. Cordelia slid out of the truck and went to meet him at a more sedate pace, her back stiff. Lindsey knew that the attacks of the last twenty-four hours had to be weighing heavily on her mind. Lindsey's hand trailed to the revolver, tucked between the seats with the safety on. Not like the hunting rifles that his daddy had taught him how to use by the time he entered middle school, but it didn't require two working hands. Lindsey's fingers lingered on the metal for a moment, then, reluctantly, he left it behind.

Santa Claus was grinning at Cordelia as if the very fact that she was alive and breathing made her the finest thing that he had ever seen. The smile didn't so much as flicker when he caught sight of Lindsey, but there was a shadow in the other man's eyes that Lindsey didn't like. He wondered how much of his movements had been visible before exiting the truck. "No need to be nervous," Santa Claus called. "There's two of you and one of me, ain't there?"

"That implies an interest in fighting fair. You'd be surprised how little that gets you." Lindsey could hear the drawl crawling back into his voice. He took a protective step towards Cordelia.

"Good point." Santa Claus shrugged the threat implicit in the words off like a dog shaking water from its coat. He looked at Lindsey's abrupt wrist and Cordelia's bruised neck in turn, a dry clinician's stare that catalogued rather than pitied. It jangled hard against the rest of him and made Lindsey's adrenal glands tingle. "Though it looks like the two of you have been playing the odds for a while. I'm Whitney Horgan."

"Lindsey McDonald." It wasn't only his injury that kept Lindsey from extending his hand in introduction. He and Cordelia were standing closer to one another than ever. Lindsey was reminded of dogs that he had seen that afternoon, waving their tails in slow, stiff greetings as the truck had driven past but unwilling to approach.

"Excellent!" Whitney wasn't going to take no for an answer on the business of shaking hands, and he only hesitated over the mechanics of it for a moment. Whitney grinned the entire time, while Lindsey had to struggle to do the same. It wasn't until he noticed the small bulge beneath Whitney's shirt that he understood why.

Whitney turned towards Cordelia after he released Lindsey, his smile turning into something that could have fooled the best politician. "Cordelia Chase," Cordelia said in cultured tones, extending her right hand. "Pleased to meet you." Polite formality made it impossible to gauge her emotions.

If Whitney noticed, then he did not care. He glanced back and forth between the two of them, regaining some of his ebullient expression. "From the way the two of you were staring at that interstate as though it was the last drink of water and you came to the party short a glass, I'm guessing you want to head east."

"That's right," Cordelia said. "Nebraska."

Whitney glanced at Lindsey. "Well, Stephanie-Ann and I are only going as far as Las Vegas, but we can certainly take you that far. Who knows, you might decide that it's more to your liking than cornfields."

Cordelia curved her lips into a polite smile. "I think we're pretty dead-set on Nebraska, actually. But if you can get us as least part of the way across the desert…" She glanced towards Lindsey, eyebrow raised. He schooled his face into lines of absolute neutrality. Let his decision, at least, not be left up to him, and he would let it serve him as a sign.

Cordelia turned back to Whitney. "We'd be delighted to."

Whitney's grin turned up another notch; Lindsey thought that he was in danger of hurting himself. "I guess you both know how lonely it's been since this whole thing started," he said, helping them as they began to transfer their belongings from one vehicle to the other. Lindsey pulled the bullets from the gun and shoved it to the bottom of his pack before handing it off. "Outside of meeting Stephanie-Ann last week, you two are the first pair that I've seen to still remember that you're people."

"What do you think caused it?" Cordelia asked.

"The plague, you mean?" Whitney set a duffel bag full of canned goods down at his feet and straightened. The affability bled out of his face, and in its absence Lindsey could see the man who would wear Flagg's stone. He wondered if he appeared the same, what the hell Cordelia was doing with him if that was the case. "God, the Devil, simple evolution, maybe. Hell, the Black Death and the Ebola virus both popped up their nasty little heads without any outside tinkerings. But I'm betting level money on the government." Whitney shielded his eyes with his hand and nodded towards the point on the horizon where the cars converged into a single dot. "Before the press got slapped with a collective muzzle, there were reports coming in of whole cities being quarantined at gunpoint, as if it weren't so far out of control by then that nothing short of massive genetic shift was going to put a halt to it. I'll bet you the Hummer and everything in it that we'll find just that kind of quarantine attempt going on down there. People don't try that hard to keep a secret unless they're the ones that caused it in the first place." Whitney's face darkened further; the expression of grim determination reminded Lindsey of Angel. "Frankly, the think-tank that got careless with their plague jars and managed to think the whole world straight into the bone yard had better be glad that they're dead. 'Cause I'm not in the mood to be nearly so kind as Captain Trips."

Lindsey glanced towards Cordelia, expecting a protest. Her face was troubled, but her eyes were flinty. Cordelia didn't say a word.

The kindness came back into Whitney's face like dawn gliding over the horizon. "Good thing I didn't decide to go into politics, huh?" he asked, helping them carry the last of their things away from the truck. Lindsey's eyes widened as he opened up the Hummer's cargo area. Whitney had paid a visit to a gas station sometime before the electricity had gone: covering every inch of available floor space were cans upon cans of gasoline. He glanced towards Whitney, who said only, "She doesn't run on water, you know." Lindsey nodded and loaded up the last of their gear, trying not to stare too much at the bulge beneath Whitney's shirt. He wondered if Whitney was doing the same to him.

There was a small, fluffy blonde sleeping in the front seat, looking very much like the puppy that Whitney's mannerisms strove so hard to imitate. Whitney lowered his voice to a whisper as they climbed inside, though if Lindsey's honking hadn't woken her earlier, then a normal-pitched conversation wasn't likely to. "Stephanie-Ann. The Hummer was her brother's." Whitney gave the steering wheel a fond pat. Lindsey saw Cordelia lean forward to avoid resting her back against the seats.

---
The deadlocked traffic lasted for more than fifteen miles. It seemed as though every soul that had still been well enough to attempt an escape from the city had done so at one point or another. The reek of death in the air was nearly thick enough to touch, seeping through the air-conditioning and swirling around them like a wraith. There was no way that Cordelia and Lindsey could have made it without abandoning the truck and landing themselves in more trouble than they were walking away from. The Hummer, by virtue of being road-optional, trundled along easily. "Guess someone was really looking out for you guys," Whitney called over his shoulder.

'Someone certainly was,' Lindsey thought. He decided then that he didn't like Lindsey very much.

A coyote jumped eagerly at the open window of one of the cars, getting a few inches closer with each panting effort. The animal threw the Hummer a disinterested glance as it trundled by before renewing its task with vigor. Lindsey looked away to avoid the moment when it succeeded, only to lock eyes with Cordelia. She held Lindsey's gaze for only an instant before she went back to watching the animal, her face a blank marble mask.

Towards the back of the traffic jam, al of the dead were victims of the plague. At its origin the story took a very different turn. Bodies hung halfway out of the car windows and stretched out across the pavement, savaged by both animals and the elements. The damaged was not so severe that it hid the lack of Captain Trip's tell-tale black swellings on many of the corpses. Bullets holes told a tale all their own.

"My God," Cordelia whispered, her voice beginning to quiver. Lindsey turned and saw that what he had mistaken for tears was some of the rawest anger that he had ever seen. Cordelia's face blazed with it. "How could they do such a thing?" Cordelia's voice rose towards a shout, causing Stephanie-Ann to turn over and mumble in her sleep. Whitney glanced at them through the rearview mirror but said nothing. "Half of these people looked like they were immune!"

"Cordelia." Lindsey put his hand on her arm. "You're beginning to yell."

"Maybe someone needs to." Cordelia lowered her voice, but her eyes continued to gleam with emotion. It was like sitting next to a small sun. "They were supposed to be protecting people, not lining up to join in the slaughter." They rolled slowly pas the killers. From the look on Cordelia's face, it was a struggle not to roll down the window and spit. In marked contrast to the civilian corpses, only one or two of the military showed evidence of a violent death. Lindsey surmised that they had been the isolated few who had stood up in favor of their humanity. He struggled to imagine what that was like.

"The world tends to stop being black and white when you stop being a Champion," Lindsey said, watching as a crow fluttered down to land on the body of a young man. The bird cawed and hopped towards the eyes.

"Tell me you're not defending this!" Cordelia's voice was more than shocked; it was betrayed.

Lindsey turned away from the window, leaving behind the corpses and his reflection. "Of course not," he said, adopting the friendly, confident tone that he had worn closer than skin for the past two weeks. "I'm just saying…these men were scared. By the time people began trying to flee the city, the situation up top had probably gotten really bad. Orders coming through intermittently when they came through at all, CO's dropping like flies…they clung to the ones that were the most familiar."

"The fact that shooting civilians was the most familiar doesn't work as a mark in their favor," Cordelia said, flicking a disgusted look over him. It was the same look that she had given him when had showed up on her doorstep, one that he thought he was well on the way to never seeing again. It was kissing cousins to the look of contempt that Angel had worn the first time that Lindsey had walked into his office and every meeting between them since. Lindsey felt the old fury rising in his cheeks and looked away so that Cordelia would not see it in his eyes. Familiarity wrapped him in its comfortless cocoon.