Schism Read Online Free Page A

clutch.”
    Stepping around the corpse, he grabbed onto the doorframe and compressed the pedal with his right foot. Andy put the gear was in neutral and turned the key. After a lengthy turn over, the engine started. Her eyes immediately searched for the fuel gauge. “Thank God! There’s more than half a tank!”
    “Yeah, and a bloody mess on the seat.” Charlie was looking down at where the corpse had been. The seat was covered in dried blood and looked as though it had been slashed with a blade many times.
    “Oh, you big baby. We can cover the seat with a towel.”
    Charlie grimaced but couldn’t deny the stupidity of passing up a functioning vehicle with more than a hundred miles of gas in it because of a little blood. “Okay, but you drive.”
    “And I’m sitting in the back,” Morgan declared.
    “Fine,” Andy conceded.
    “What about the boat?” Charlie asked with concern. “What if this truck dies fifty kilometers down the road?”
    “Well, then we can either bike back, or we’ll find another car or something. But we can’t stay on that boat forever.”
    Morgan and Charlie looked at each other, uncertain.
    “We can always come back, okay?” Andy reassured while examining the sky. Nightfall was approaching. “It’s too late to drive anywhere now, and since it doesn’t look like anyone’s coming by to steal our boat or much else, let’s head back for the night. We’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
    “Okay.”
    Before heading back to the boat, Andy glanced down at the corpse and wondered again about the missing legs but only for a moment. Just another dead body amongst the thousands she’d seen.
    ***
    The smell of bleach had replaced the smell of human decay. Morgan had insisted on purging the truck of bloodstains and melted flesh and spent the first hour of the new day scrubbing the seats while Andy and Charlie unloaded their things off the boat.
    Andy drove the entire way to Washington DC the following morning. There were just a few cars stranded in the middle of the highway as the city drew closer, but soon they increased to such a number that she was forced to weave between the vehicles, treating the highway like an obstacle course. At one point when the road became completely blocked, she rammed her way through them. Some of the abandoned cars were like coffins containing a skeleton or two, while others sat empty. The congestion worsened at the Capital Beltway that encircled the city. It was as though the virus had struck every driver dead at the exact same moment during the peak of rush hour traffic. A horrifying moment frozen in time.
    “Charlie, get me off this road!” Andy cried in frustration.
    Charlie deftly found their location on his roadmap. “Take this exit,” he pointed. It was a sign for another highway.
    “Okay.” She pulled off the Beltway and onto I-395 where conditions improved. Her palms began to sweat as they crossed the Potomac River. She felt like they were becoming more and more trapped the closer they got to the city limits.
    “Are you sure we want to keep going?” Morgan asked as though reading her friend’s mind.
    Andy didn’t answer. She wiped each hand on her jean shorts.
    “We’ve come this far. Might as well keep going,” said Charlie, trying to remain upbeat.
    Off to her left, Andy saw the Washington Monument. “Charlie, can you get me there?” she said, gesturing toward the gray obelisk jutting sharply into the skyline.
    He nodded and reexamined the map.
    Morgan pressed her head against her window and stared at the monument. “At least it’s still standing,” she murmured.
    When they reached the monument, Andy parked in front of the overgrown lawn surrounding its base. Morgan and Charlie followed as she walked toward the monument. The entire area was disturbingly quiet; not a soul or sign of life in sight.
    Within yards of the visitor’s entrance, Andy stopped dead in her tracks. “What the—?”
    The land where fifty American flags had