Lincoln must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, for the world around him slowly faded from countryside to suburbs. Gas stations replaced trees, townhouses farmhouses , and large hotels blocked out the northern sky.

Where was he?

On the late afternoon of July 23, he stood in the middle of what appeared to be an interstate, the four lanes separated by a concrete dividing wall, and looked bewilderedly about himself like an old man with Alzheimer's. The section of road he was on now passed before a number of restaurants and strip malls.

A number of the buildings along the street stood dark and huddled, their fronts shattered and looted, or even blackened from fire. The road itself was empty at this particular spot, but further along there was a massive pile-up of over two dozen cars that spanned all of the lanes. From here, it looked like maybe a tractor trailer had slammed into the wall, and everyone behind him was taken by surprise.

He sighed, a coal of anger beginning to smolder in his chest. This was not the kind of place he wanted to be. He'd taken every precaution to avoid built-up areas. The AAA roadmap he'd taken from that gas station awhile back showed nothing but open country between the Jersey border and Washington, with the exception of Philadelphia, of course, but he was a hundred or more miles northwest of there anyway.

With something like dejection, he went over to a bench and sat heavily down, the day silent and sluggish around him. It was in the nineties and humid. His face and arms were dry, but his back and armpits were soaked with perspiration. Presently, he stripped his shirt off and stuffed it into his bag. In doing so, he looked around, and a surge of frustration went through him. Where the hell was he?

Well, only one way to find out. He pulled out the map and studied his route. The road he had taken from Meham Township was 50, and passed through nothing but farmland until Maryland, where it skirted D.C. The problem was, though, the last sign he had seen didn't say 50, it said 220.

Impossible, he thought, his mind reeling. He studied the map, and eventually found a small, red line that answered to 220. He was just outside of Pittsburgh.

"Bullshit!" he cried aloud, the sound of his voice echoing in the dead world slightly scaring him. He looked around, almost as if in fear of something having heard him, and then back down at the map. There was no way in hell he had taken a wrong road all the way to Pittsburgh. He was at least a hundred miles east of there, and it had only been two days.

Lincoln was confused. His mind just couldn't grasp it. There was no logical way, just none at all. This was impossible. It...it just wasn't happening.

Pittsburgh, he thought, looking around, shaking his foggy head. He felt as if he had stepped into the Twilight Zone; he was uncanny, eerie, thunderstruck, dumbfounded, and just plain scared.

Twilight Zone or not, he had gotten way off his route, and he needed to get back. South of Pittsburgh, the map said, there was nothing but wilderness for as far as the eye could see. After about two hundred miles of mountains and forest, there was the western edge of Maryland, and that was about as deserted as a gay club on the moon.

After a moment of calculation, he figured he was an extra three hundred miles from home. Thanks to a detour thrown to him by some cruel god. He felt like Ulysses, from The Odyssey, a Greek soldier who spent fifteen or so years trying to get home to his family, only to be kicked around the ocean and stranded on every little sandbar from Troy to Athens.

Was that to be his fate? Would he strike off tomorrow at dawn, only to wind up in San Francisco by dusk?

His head spun. He suddenly wanted a drink, badly.

The way he saw it, he had two choices: either retrace his steps back, or bore into Pittsburgh, find the turnpike, and follow it all the way to Maryland. He was leery of going back (only Christ knew where the schizophrenic thing would take him next), but terrified of going forward. It was nearly five in the afternoon. While he had a few hours of light left, he didn't want to find himself in the middle of a tomb quiet necropolis at dusk. Unlike Kato Sanchez several thousand miles away, he wasn't afraid of zambees or vampyris, he worried about highwaymen and raiders, thieves and rotting cadavers.

Which left him little choice but camp out until tomorrow. Either that or go back.

Decisions, decisions.

He decided to stay. As the sunlight grew weak and warm, he struck off and found himself a nice wooded hill between a school and a 7-11 to camp on; from the log on which he sat, near the fire, he could see down into the back parking lot of the convenience store, the vision framed with swaying foliage.

He didn't sleep much that night, but when he did, he dreamt. Since the night of the tornado, he'd been having vivid nightmares. Most of them were variations of the first; the vampire bat, the city, the sound of wings beating against the night. Toward dawn, however, he had a new, though equally frightening, one.

In it, he was standing in a darkened corner and looking into what seemed to be a royal throne room. A man who looked uncannily like Jefferson Davis stood in a rigid posture, his hands clasped behind his back, his face grim and white, while a black, incorporeal mist spoke from the throne:

"All of them. I want them all. I shall gather them like chicks under my wing, and then I will bring down the hammer. My time is short, but man's is shorter."

"Who are you?" a voice seemed to vibrate from the walls, the ceiling, the floors.

"I am the rough beast," the mist said, "and I've come for you." Suddenly, the mist was a man, and the man was pointing into the shadows, straight at Lincoln, and smiling. His face was gray and drawn, and his eyes were burning embers. His teeth, God, his teeth were overhanging his lip and dripping blood. He was the bat.

Lincoln woke sometime after sunrise, panting and shivering, so afraid that for a long moment he couldn't bring himself to even breath.

Pittsburgh, he thought. Remembering the city, the ten miles of urban destruction that lie between him and the turnpike, he got up and got ready.

At first, the going was slow. He followed a narrow residential street back to the main road, and came out just a mile upwind of the pile-up, a mass, wild jumble of twisted metal and dead bodies. There was no way he could go over it; he'd have to find another way.

And that way was overland, through backyards, over wooden fences, and along alleyways. The pile up was much larger than he had thought at first; it took him two hours to finally get around it and back onto the road.

The first sign he saw beyond the motor boneyard read PITTSBURGH 5. Ahead, he could see part of the city on a massive hill, houses splashed in haphazard tiers across the rocky face.

Another two miles brought him to a river beyond which rose a cluster of tall buildings. The suspension bridge connecting the two banks was crammed with stalled traffic. Lincoln wove in and out of the mess for nearly a half an hour, and at one point had to pick his way across a number of roofs because the vehicles were packed so tightly together.

Back on land, the highway went on for another mile before sharply rounding a wooded hill dominated by a hospital. Standing on the bridge, the man saw with falling spirits that the traffic jam continued, and was even worse near the bend; it looked like another accident from here, but the glare of the sun off the metallic tombs blinded him and he couldn't tell.

He sighed. He couldn't turn back now. He'd had that luxury right up until the moment he set foot on the bridge. Now he was committed. Pittsburgh or bust.

He followed the road. The cars weren't as tightly jammed as they had appeared, and he managed to make most of the trip to the bend by using the breakdown lane. He kept his eyes straight ahead (trained on a billboard for Cocaine toothache drops), and did his best not to notice the corpse trapped in their cars, their frozen faces looking hungrily out at the world.

At the bend, he was forced to climb onto the roof of a Chevy van in order to see over a tall Mac truck. The view was actually spectacular, even though it couldn't have been more than ten feet off the ground. To his right was another river, and Pittsburgh proper, hazy in the mid-afternoon heat, seemingly a backdrop for some urban play. Ahead rose a tall, bushy hill. The four stalled lanes flowed right into two large, upside down U shaped openings. A tunnel.

Knees weak, Lincoln sat down. A tunnel. Great. He could only imagine what sort of awful mess waited in the darkness. Piles of cars, rotted bodies...

He took a deep breath. No reason to get himself worked up. It would be fine.

He climbed down and stood momentarily next to the van, looking ahead. The tunnel was about a mile off, so he'd reach it in about twenty minutes, leaving him over seven hours to get through it before dark. He doubted, hoped, prayed, that he wouldn't need that long.

When he reached the tunnel entrance, he paused again and looked deep into the gaping blackness, his heart beating just a little quicker.

He wondered if he should turn back and find another way. He tried to remember the map and couldn't, but he was pretty sure that this was the quickest way.

Closing his eyes, Lincoln took a deep breath. He wished he had a flashlight.

Inside, it was cool and dark, and every little sound he made was magnified by the stone walls around him. For the first half mile, the sunlight streaming in from outside provided some dim and watery assistance, but beyond that, the darkness grew total. He felt almost like a morsel as it traveled down some great beast's esophagus. He licked his lips and looked back over his shoulder. Daylight was but a pinprick in black velvet.

He turned back ahead and took a short, shuffling step, his foot scraping the concrete. He put out his arms, and the fingers of his right arm brushed what felt like the fender of a car.

He stepped forward again. And again. And again. This last time, his knees bumped into something's bumper.

Taking a shivering breathing, he sidestepped it like a blind man and fumbled on. Every five minutes, it seemed, he came up against another car and had to slightly alter his route. At one point, he nearly tripped over something that felt like the torso of a human body.

Don't panic, don't panic, he kept telling himself, chanting it the entire way. It seemed like it took hours; the road kept going on and on. By the time he caught his first glimpse of daylight up ahead, he felt like he had been weeks in the tunnel. It couldn't have been more than two hours, though; the sun was still high and bright when he emerged, his eyes squinted and arm raised, like a man from a thousand year sleep.

Once his eyes had adjusted, he was pleased to see that the world on this side of the mountain was entirely different. Though he couldn't be more than three miles out of Pittsburgh, the land around him seemed untainted and unspoiled, save for the turnpike, which wound down a slope and disappeared around the base of a hill. On one side of him was a slanted rockface. On the other, a distant valley guarded by hazy blue mountains.

"Thank God," he panted, and started walking.

The end of the day found him twelve miles south of the tunnel, halfway in-between the only two towns for twenty miles.

As dusk drew languid and blue, he left the deserted turnpike and followed a canted off-ramp to a lonely two lane highway which ran under the interstate. A blue sign at the intersection pointed left and right, indicating motels and restaurants: he opted to go right, under the overpass, and two miles down the road. There, he found a three story Holiday Inn near a river. The lobby was dark and the double doors locked tightly. He smashed them open with a rock, and then carefully picked away the jagged shards before he stepped in. Behind the counter, he found a pegboard and took a key at random (room 116), and then hurried down a long corridor and up an echoy stairwell, the back of his neck tingling as if in expectation of a blow. Nothing came out of the shadows for him, though, and he reached his room safely.

The inside was sparse and bare: a bed, a writing table under the window, and an electric lamp on the scuffed nightstand. He locked and bolted the door behind him and sat on the edge of the bed, his aching feet thankful and his weary back glad.

For a long time, he stared into the gathering gloom, thinking of Pittsburgh, his dreams, and New York. He remembered the faces of the uncollected dead as he tiptoed out of the city on the George Washington Bridge, car alarms, screaming, and gunshots following him like the voices of many phantoms, and he shuddered. He thought of the bat and of the black mist in the throne. He thought of home, and of what it probably looked like now. Dead. Deserted. Burnt. Ashes, embers, and skeletons.

At some point, he began to cry. Something inside of him snapped, a dam broke, and he sobbed. He thought of dead children, stricken with the plague and screaming from their cribs, or trapped in playpens after their parents breathed their last, starving and crying, desperate for just one mouthful of Sunny D, one last suck of their bottle. He thought of his kind old mother, who was surely dead. He'd gotten a letter that she was sick with pneumonia some two months ago, but he was sure it was plague, and that she was dead now, heaped into some pile with dozens of other grinning corpses. He thought of the world and of all the things that were gone and would never be again, and he wept.

Finally, after what may have been hours or only minutes, he slept. In his dreams, he was lost in a sea of grain, trying to find his way back to the highway, scared and alone, panic beginning to well up from his stomach. He was certain that something was after him, that a dark thing was chasing him, and that it would catch and devour him if he didn't find the highway, which was some sort of base.

But he couldn't get to it, and spent forever running around in circles. He had almost given up hope when he stumbled, tripped, and fell to his knees. Suddenly, the scene around him changed. He was in a white void. No sky, no land, no nothing, just frosty background. A tiny man in a white suit and glasses appeared before him from thin air, and Lincoln started. The man's hair was slicked back from his forehead and his face...his face was red as if with paint.

"Who are you?" Lincoln asked.

The man beamed and thrust his thumbs through his suspenders. There was a smarminess about him that Lincoln instantly didn't like. He reminded him of a travelling preacher who came through his home village when he was a boy and held tent revivals every night while eyeing the womenfolk and begging for money. A lot of babies were born nine months after he left. In fact, Lily, his youngest sister, was one of them.

"I'm Brother Love," the preacher said. "I'm..well, you could say I speak on behalf of you-know-how."

Lincoln's brow furrowed. "You know who?"

"Yep. The one and only."

"No, I mean...who is it?"

Brother Love looked up, and Lincoln understood.

Oh.

Him.

Okay.

Random...but whatever.

"He's chosen you to do his work, divine work, work that's so important He wouldn't give it to just anyone. Why, you should really be honored. If they write a sequel to the good book, you'll be in it like Moses."

Lincoln didn't want to be Moses.

"What work?"

Brother Love sighed. "Well...I can't tell you that. It's not for me to know right now." He chuckled fondly. "The Big Guy loves surprises. I'm going to come to you again and give you what you need to know. Right now, keep on your current course. Until then, I'm Brother Love, and I looooooove you."

The way he drew it out made the proclamation sound as fake as a four dollar bill.

Lincoln was still doubting when he woke up.

Back on the road, hee made six miles by noon. The road followed a craggy ridgeline several thousand feet above sea level. Looking off of the highway, all he could see were mountains and sky. He broke for lunch near a wooded glen at one. In addition to eating, he communed with the world around him. Once his beans and rice had been put away, he sat cross-legged and listened to nature: the rushing river and the light breeze in the laden summer trees.

You have work to do. His work. Divine work.

Lincoln opened his eyes, the dream coming hazily back to him.

His work. Divine work.

Just a dream, surely, but an odd one. In fact, he'd been having a lot of weird dreams, and that in itself was disturbing; he wasn't a very imaginative man, and when he dreamt, his dreams were uninspired. The ones he'd been having over the past couple days were seemingly symbolic and meaningful.

His work.

Who's work?

Just a dream. It doesn't matter.

But what if it did? It sure felt like it did.

His work.

Later in the day, he came across another bad smash up in the road, this one blackened and charred like a jumbled mess left too long in the oven.

The turnpike was now two lanes, and both of them were blocked. To one side there was a forested hump of earth. To the other...nothing.

He left the highway and climbed the hill. Huffing and puffing, lightheaded with exhaustion, he reached the summit in ten minutes and turned to look behind him. Down below, he saw the pile-up; thankfully, it was just one heap and then nothing, the road was clear for as far as he could see, which was another three or four miles. In the distance, shimmering like a desert mirage, something rose from the land like a small city. He quickly checked the map (afraid that somehow he had come to another misplaced city, perhaps London or Moscow), and saw with something like relief that it was merely a large T&A truck stop, one of those huge, sprawling complexes with a diner, shower facilities, a motel, arcade...a home away from home for weary travelers.

That didn't mean that it couldn't be Chicago or Paris, but he sure hoped that it wasn't.

Carefully, he began descending the hillside. About halfway down, something went wrong (to be precise, he stepped in a gopher hole), and he pitched forward, screaming and waving his arms like an impotent bird.

His hit the ground hard, and the wind was knocked from his lungs. Then, he began to roll. Head over feet he went like a crumpled piece of paper, spinning, slapping rocks and roots, pain shooting up his hip and into his head and back, flesh ripping and things twisting that weren't meant to twist.

The edge of the hill ended about five feet off the pavement. He tumbled off, and smacked his head on the bumper of an overturned Ford pick-up.

The world went dark.


He came groggily awake hours later, just as blue dusk was beginning to fall over the mountain. He groaned, his head throbbing monstrously, and fought to keep from sinking back into murky unconsciousness.

Where am I? he thought dazedly as he tried to sit up. The world swam out of focus, and he fell back to the cement, screaming aloud, lightheaded and nauseous.

Slowly, as he lay panting and gazing up at the stars, it came back to him. The pile up, the fall, the bumper. Head injury. Jesus Christ. He bashed his head opened and he was probably in the process of dying. What was the capital of the U.S.? He couldn't remember, and it frightened him beyond words. His brain was scrambled and he was a vegetable.

He passed out.

As he had every night for a week (more? less?) he dreamed. Tonight, his head, perhaps jangled by the fall, was power packed with them. First he had another one with the bat perched atop the Richmond skyline. This time, it was daylight, and he could see it more clearly. Its face was narrow and jagged; its eyes were red and its teeth were sharp; its skin was cold, gray and mottled, and it looked vaguely like that guy from those Star Wars movies. Palpitine? Was that it? Something like that. The one Vader answered to.

After that (he couldn't tell how long), Brother Love came to him, and ministered to him as he lie bent and broken on the roadside. "Well, I didn't think you would, but you passed that test with flying colors."

"What test?" Lincoln asked.

Brother Love smirked. "Every prophet's gotta take a spill every now and then." He chuckled and shook his head. "Anyway, The Big Guy told me you're supposed to go to Cumberland then head southeast."

"What roads shall I take?" Lincoln asked.

Brother Love thought for a moment. "Hell, I dunno. You got a map, right? Figure it out."

So much for divine intervention.

That thought still rang through Lincoln's head when he came awake. The sky was above him, cold and vast, splattered with icily twinkling stars seeming to pulse in rhythm with his ragged heart.

He didn't know how long he had been awake. It could have been seconds, it could have been hours.

It was chilly. He shivered. What time was it? He didn't know. His pocket watch was...he didn't know. In his pocket, most likely, cracked and dead.

For the rest of the night, he hovered on the verge of consciousness. When dawn began to color the sky over the eastern mountains, he pulled himself up and sat rigidly against the concrete wall holding back the hillside. His head dully hurt, but his thinking was clearer.

He didn't get started that day until well past nine, and the going was slow. He must have twisted his ankle some, for every step sent a hot flare of agony up his leg.

It was almost two when he came within sight of the truckstop, sitting atop a hill like some sort of American Mecca. He would stay here for the night, and the next if he had to. He couldn't go on like this. He was making terrible mileage, and most likely doing irreparable damage to his foot.

The truck stop was serviced by an off-ramp which doubled back on itself in a giant U. The road at the end of it stood empty, save for a dead horse on its side and a shattered carriage to its back. To his left, it rose steeply. At the top of the rise, the truck stop.

Hissing and wincing with each step, he dragged himself the half mile, his ankle hurting so bad that he had to stop and rest halfway up. Sitting in a tuft of shaggy brown grass, panting and trying to reign in his runaway heart, he remembered the dream from the night before, or rather part of it.

Just a dream. A dumb dream.

His head ached hotly and his ankle throbbed sickly. All he cared about was getting inside and out of the beating sun. If the truck stop had a gas station (duh, of course it did) he might find some Tylenol. He also needed water. He'd drank the last of his yesterday and now his lips were dry and splitting.

His thirst more than anything drove him to his feet and up the remainder of the hill. At the top, he walked along the little service road. Across the desolate parking lot ahead, he made out three buildings side to side.

The walk took him almost fifteen minutes. By the time he staggered into the gas station, he was ready to collapse and give up. Screw Virginia. It was probably as dead as here. Why go on?

But something sustained him just a little longer. He found a bottle of painkiller and swallowed half of it, washing it down with a Noz energy drink. Sated, he collapsed in a corner amongst litter and dirt, and leaned heavily against a cooler of Coke products, now hot and flat.

He didn't sleep, but he wasn't entirely awake either. He was there for what felt like (and was) two hours, before he could force himself back to his feet. In the building next-door, he found the dark shower stalls at the end of a long, red hallway. He randomly turned one of the showerheads on, and was shocked when a warm, gentle mist sprayed forth. Like a child elated by the cool spring rains, he stripped his clothes off and stood under the water, letting it wash all of the dirt and grime from him. It had been...how long since he last bathed? Jersey. What was the name of the town? Weehawen or something else weird?

He didn't know and he didn't care.

For almost an hour, he stayed in the stall, enjoying the water, alternating between scolding and frigid. He found a dry, emaciated bar of soap on one of the ledges, and lathered his entire body, from feet to hair (he didn't dare touch his hurt ankle; it was swollen and slightly discolored, sprained but not broken).

His fingertips were wrinkled and white before he got out. He found a hamper near the door and pulled a dirty towel from it. Drying off, he noticed for the first time that day that he was ravenous. His stomach growled so loudly that for a moment he expected to hear its echo.

Okay, time to eat.

The next building over was the restaurant. Of course he didn't find any meat or fresh veggies (or, rather, he did, and they were rotting), but he did come across several large cans in a back pantry; corn, green beans, beets, peas.

He commandeered a can opener from a drawer and opened all of the first cans along the shelf (there were many). With a spoon and a fork, he sat on the floor and ate from each of them.

When his stomach was full (God, he couldn't remember the last time it was full!) evening had come. Back in the shower building, he found a large, open dormitory lined with bunk beds, reminding him of boot camp, and took the one nearest to the door. He meant only to rest his eyes, but fell almost instantly into a deep, refreshing slumber.


The next morning, he woke at eleven, his ankle throbbing and his throat raw. He thought that he was running a fever, but he couldn't be sure.

He decided to stay that day and the next. His foot needed time to heal; walking on it was only exacerbating the problem. He had food, he had the radio, he had everything he needed. He didn't need to get home right this second, did he? No. He needed rest. Home-

Richmond

-Would be there.

The day after that, there was no doubt: he was fevered and his throat hurt like hell. He coughed, sneezed, and felt as if he had been run over by a train. He wasn't going anywhere.

In fact, he was there for two weeks.