“Yeah, you do that. Keep a sharp lookout.” Miz Frank accepted the flashlight, and turned it off with a click. Jorge hung his head, and his shoulders were bowed. It was weird to see a big old dude with a cop haircut stand like he felt the weight, too. Generally, those motherfuckers just shoved it off onto whatever uterus-carrier was standing nearby. “Go on, now. Jorge—”
“I’ll stay with him,” Jorge said, almost unwillingly.
“No, you won’t.” Mike sighed, his bloody hand gripping at the clean white bandage.
Holly, brisk and decisive, made a shooing movement at the girls with both arms. “Come on, ladies. I’ll go with them.”
“Oh, God.” Chantal shook her head, her earrings swinging. “Mike…”
“It’s all right.” Mr Mock shifted against the display. A mug fell, the jolt of its shattering breaking the numbers inside Mandy’s skull. “Go on, now.”
Outside, the sky had closed over, and more snow whirled down. Mandy braced Carline, who grimaced each time her injured foot came down. They ended up near the Toyota; Carline sighed when they stopped moving.
When Miz Frank came out of the gas station, neither of the men followed her.
“Kasie?” Holly opened her arms, and Miz Frank stepped into them. Chantal hugged them both and Colleen too, everyone blinking as pellets too thin and hard to be called snow began to fall with tiny rattles.
Mandy turned her face into Carline’s neck and stayed there. Her eyes squeezed shut, and she supposed she wasn’t right in the head, because she only felt a distant, hollow sense of relief.
They were gonna get on the road again right soon, she reckoned.
It Got Loud
The mom-and-pop Kwik-Stop, gas station and sundries, was set in the opposite corner of a parking lot from a strip mall, brick buildings hunch-shivering under a swiftly darkening sky. A deserted Laundromat with soaped harvest decorations on its windows, a tobacco shop that probably did all sorts of business before the world ended, an empty storefront with a FOR RENT sign blaring a telephone number that was no doubt dead, and at the very end, blacked-out windows with neon XXX and ADULTS ONLY signs, also dead and dark now.
You could wash your clothes, grab some smokes, get some porn, and fill your gas tank all at the same time. America in a nutshell, only without a gun store. Lee didn’t like stopping here, but Ginny had broken her long silence to ask for a bathroom break ten miles ago. The truck bumped up into the parking lot through the closest approximation of a driveway, the mangled mirror on the passenger side tapping as it swung.
Should get some duct tape and fix that fucker. At least she’d stopped apologizing for scratching up his truck.
Pale and composed, looking out the window with her hands folded just-so, she was a magazine illustration of a woman lost in the scenery. Except there was nothing nice out there, just mangy patches of cracked concrete surfacing through ridged, re-freezing melt and the ribbon of a two-lane highway, a dilapidated garage on the other side of the road. Not even a one-horse town; not even a stoplight.
He opened his mouth to make some sort of remark—maybe ask Ginny if she wanted anything special likely to be in a stop-n-rob gas station, maybe tell her they weren’t gonna halt here for the night since it was only a little while longer to Carrolton—when his peripheral vision caught motion and he swung the truck aside, chains biting the freezing, ridged crust of slopmelt. Someone had been in and out of here since the snow. Several someones, and all driving.
He might have been heartened, except the motion was a staggering figure clutching at his belly. It was a middle-aged man in a hunting vest, and he wasn’t moving like a critter. One begging, blood-spattered hand outstretched, he tacked drunkenly for the truck, drawn by headlights in the gloom-grey afternoon.
Traveller, awakened by the bumping and the change in speed, scrabbled to sit upright. Ginny’s soft, indrawn gasp was lost in the crackling of static from the walkie-talkie on the dash.
“Incoming!” Juju barked through it. “Ten o’clock!”
The critters had dropped to all fours, hunch-galloping after the tubby fortysomething man whose yellow-laced Timberland boots had seen some hard working wear. Their prey’s balding head glowed, steam rising from tight-drawn skin. He looked a little like ol’ foulmouthed Cyrus Patchman, and why Lee was thinking about an old logistics officer he’d never done more than say hello Captain to once or twice was a mystery.
The mind did funny things when adrenaline started flowing.
“Help!” The man waved his free arm wildly, words thin and tinny through the rolled-up windows. “Help me!”
“Oh, God,” Ginny whispered. “They’re going to…oh, God, Lee…”
He was already reaching for the talkie. “Back on the road, get back on the road, copy.”
“Copy that.” Juju didn’t sound fazed in the slightest. The Jeep curved, bumping over heaving pavement full of ridged ice, heading for the second driveway. The chains rasped as Lee turned the wheel, intending to fall in line. Juju could take point for a while.
“Lee…” Ginny, breathlessly. “They’re going to get him.”
“We can’t help him.” Was he telling her, or himself? The man’s gut was bleeding badly, a line of crimson spatters charting his weaving course from the jimmied-open door of the Kwik-Stop. “We just can’t.”
The man put on a burst of incredible, unbelievable speed, and cut right across the truck’s arc. The critters sped up too, maybe sensing their target was about to escape. Had the fellow been hiding inside the store, waiting for someone to come along? Hoping against hope?
More critters boiled from the Kwik-Stop’s door. Who knew what desperate battle this fellow had been waging inside? Lee’s conscience pinched, but faintly. Even if they could stop, picking up this fellow and trying to stop the bleeding…well, it didn’t look good.
Nothing about this looked good except the chances of getting one of his own people bit.
The critters began leaping for the truck and the man skidded to a stop, one arm folded over his gushing midriff and the other outflung. “Please!” he yelled. “Please!”
Right in their way. Right in front of the truck.
God damn it, what was he hoping for? Lee swore, and the truck kept going, gaining speed as it came out of the curve. “Motherfucker,” Lee muttered, losing the swear-battle with himself, and Ginny’s legs were stiff, pushing her back into the seat like she thought she was standing on the brake.
Thud. Thudthud. Impacts against the sides of the Chevy, the critters throwing themselves at the metal beast. A wet, livid hand splatted against Ginny’s window; she cried out and Traveller was in her lap, barking furiously.
When shit went bad, it never stopped to brace itself before the plunge, and it got loud. Lee pushed the accelerator, the chains ground down to the paving, and the truck lurched as something soft got caught under the back left wheel. The grill plowed right into the wounded man, who went down with an approximation of a grateful moan—or a horrified one, and Lee knew, miserably, that he was going to have nightmares about this. They were lining up at the door already, just waiting for him to close his eyes.
Heavy American metal on practically new, chained-up tires barely paused, jolting over flesh, bone, and slippery spraying blood.
Traveller’s nose was against the window, his barking reaching a furious pitch. He scrabbled in Ginny’s arms, tearing at her coat-sleeves with blunt doggy claws.
Lee twisted the wheel again to get them out of the parking lot and onto the highway once more. The walkie-talkie lit up, Juju needing a status update, and Lee reached for it with a dry mouth, sweat all down his back and his skin too tight all over him. He heard himself, calmly, giving the a-ok and telling Juju to look out for a better bathroom stop, since he was in front now.
Ginny hitched in a sobbing breath. There was a dragging under the truck, and he had to give the engine more fuel to shake it free. Was it the man or one of the critters? In any case, it fell off a few moments later, the back
wheels lifting and dropping like they’d put a speed bump on the highway, and Ginny, milk-pale, made another small sound, a hitching moan.
Traveller finally calmed, Ginny smoothing his fur and crooning to him, a wordless tranquilizing hum probably doing double duty to soothe herself as well. Lee turned the wipers on, pressed the button for the washer fluid. Nothing was on the windshield, he just…needed to clean it, that was all. He was pretty sure that when they stopped, Ginny wouldn’t want to be in the truck with him no more.
But dear God and sonny Jesus in heaven, what else could he have done?
Reassurance
Cars clustered nose-to-tail both ways on I-71 over the Ohio River, but Juju and Lee had anticipated as much and the Roebling was far less choked. Edging past the checkpoints at either end of the big suspension bridge was par for the course now, but midway across something very much like panic gripped every inch of Ginny’s body, and she went rigid.
Traveller whined a little, but Lee said nothing, and when the fear passed, she ached all over worse than she had after the flu.
A thin misting drizzle turned into steel-colored rain on the other side of Cincinnati, and Ginny suspected everyone else was as glad to be over the state line as she was. It wasn’t Kentucky’s fault, really. No state of the Union asked to be full of walking dead. Or mostly dead. Or whatever they were. The more Ginny thought about it, the more she wished she hadn’t been a rationalist by both birth and education. Some brain-numbing religion to crawl into would be awful comforting right now.
Though whispering Jesus please occasionally as the afternoon wore on didn’t seem to be helping Lee any. And every bump in the road made Ginny flinch again.
Their halt that evening was office building—the sign blared Kenwood Parke, a big block of concrete with awnings and tattered landscaping attempting to dress up its edges. The brick structure stared with dark windows across a maze of similar buildings. Juju avoided the residential areas—he was right to, nobody would come to this honeycomb of mid-grade offices to loot, and most of the professionals here while the world crumbled probably had the luxury of calling in sick.
There was a suite shared by a psychiatrist and several therapists on the second floor, and when Ginny pointed out they were likely to have snacks and couches, it was settled. Again, Lee said nothing, just nodded, hung his rifle on his shoulder, and began carrying luggage inside after the usual check to make sure it was deserted. The kids chattered nervously, stealing little glances at him every once in a while as they worked, and Juju, standing at the side door they’d managed to pry open, shook his head and told Ginny to stay in sight with the dog, ma’am.
The quiet wore on her nerves. God, if only Lee would say something. Yell, even. Instead, he’d barely even spoken into the walkie-talkie. The soft pleas for Jesus to do something nameless didn’t really count, either.
Traveller slunk around her ankles, trotting away to do his business near a bank of thorny evergreen bushes that must have been trimmed before everyone got sick. He didn’t pull at the leash to get one more delicious smell stuffed in his nose, either, but came right back to her, his tail at half-mast and his big brown eyes saddened.
“I know it’s almost supper time,” she told him. “You really don’t have to remind me.”
He perked up, tail lifting, and she wished it was as easy to cheer up a human.
A human being who had to drive over a wounded man and several…zombies. We can’t help him. And Lee’s ashen face. How did you talk about something like that? How on God’s earth could you reassure someone in the face of that happy horseshit, as her neighbor Harry McCoy used to bellow in his living room when some kind of football game had gone awry on their flatscreen? You could hear him on spring evenings when the windows were open, before summer heat closed everyone in their own little air-conditioned cells.
How often had Ginny wished he would just be quiet? Quiet forever, now. She shuddered, and Traveller trotted obediently at her side, back into the shelter of a deserted building.
Six offices, two with at least a loveseat, three with full-size couches. There was even a tiny kitchenette, and of course the therapists wouldn’t have discussed their cases with identifying details, but had any of them sitting at the small lunch table with its two spindly chairs wondered why everyone had come down with the flu? Had someone locked up the deserted office and gone home to find a fever-stricken loved one, or a roommate making that awful grinding noise?
Ginny stood in the kitchenette doorway, imagining, and jumped when Lee bumped into her. Her MagLite clattered on linoleum. She ducked for it, he did too, and Ginny braced herself.
Instead of grabbing the fallen light, she caught his hand.
Lee’s skin was cold, for once. Callused, work-roughened, and tense, his fingers trembling. It hadn’t stopped him from piloting the truck smoothly, or checking the building with Juju while she and the kids waited. He’d just…what? Compartmentalized? Put everything else aside?
Did he ever rest?
He balanced on his haunches and went still, except for that almost imperceptible tremor.
Ginny’s throat dried up. “Lee,” she whispered. Juju said something in one of the other rooms, and Mark laughed. Quietly, hushed as if this were a doctor’s office.
In a way, it was.
“Say something,” she persisted, softly. “Anything. Just to me. Please.” Her knees ached, and her back too. She kept hearing the soft thud-thud and feeling the jolt as the truck mowed down flesh and bone in its way.
The horrible thought—that running over the man had been a kindness, given what was chasing him—just wouldn’t go away.
Lee shook his head. The beam from his flashlight sliced to the side, catching pasteboard cabinets and the shiny edge of a refrigerator, probably growing a culture or two of penicillin inside. They’d joked, at work in the county library, about leftover lunches achieving sentience inside a fridge or two.
Wouldn’t it be funny if all of this was, at bottom, just some microwaved something left too long in a Frigidaire?
Yeah. Hysterical. Ginny held on with her free hand too, cupping his and threading her fingers through. Her knees hit the floor, which was all right, because she suspected they’d gone a little jelly-like anyway. She tugged, and he didn’t fight her, leaning forward until his balance shifted and his own knees smacked the linoleum. If it hurt, he made no sign. Not even a sharp breath.
Shadows danced. Ginny pulled, a little more sharply. Why am I doing this?
It didn’t matter. For once, she didn’t think about how silly it would look if anyone came down the short internal hallway to the kitchenette. They were unpacking, and Traveller was making low yipping sounds as Steph talked to him. It was a comfort to hear quiet human voices, not close but not too far away.
It was another comfort when she awkwardly shuffled her knees across industrial linoleum and got her arms around Lee. His shaking intensified.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. He sagged against her, his flashlight trapped between them now and the darkness returning except for the forlorn gleam of her dropped MagLite, pointed into a corner. “There was nothing you could do. Nothing at all.”
Maybe he believed her. In any case, he went limp, and the shaking all through him jarred her teeth, her shoulders, her knees. She cradled him as best she could, and pressed her lips to his damp temple, her nose buried in his lengthening hair. A breath of leather, a tang of lemon, and a dark, golden scent that was purely male wrapped around her, and she found herself rocking slightly, thankful he’d set his rifle aside and doubly thankful he wasn’t wearing a baseball cap. That would have been uncomfortable indeed.
“It’s all right,” she kept whispering. “Shhh, Lee. It’s all right. There was nothing we could do.” Her lips pressed against his skin, and his shoulders shook. His arms slithered around her, and held tight. “Shhh, Lee. It’s okay. Everything’s all right.”
God, I hope he believes me.
“If you do, use protecti
on.” Ginny splashed her face with cold water, patted dry with paper towels. At least the restrooms on this floor were well-stocked, and there was the luxury of three pillar candles to fill the ladies’ half with a tolerably romantic glow. “Do you need condoms?”
Steph turned pink and choked, her toothbrush hanging from her mouth. “Mrphle Mlls!” she squeaked, perilously close to spraying Crest foam on the mirror.
“What?” It was kind of amusing to shock a teenager. “I remember what hormones were like. The last thing you need is to be knocked up in the middle of all this, right?”
Steph spat and rinsed her mouth. “I, uh. Yeah, I guess.” She kept running the water, splashing, making sure all the toothpaste went down on its frigid, rippling back. “But…can’t you count days since your last period, or something? And if the guy doesn’t, you know, if he doesn’t, do the you know, in your hoo-haw…”
Dear God, I’m about to give a crash course in sex ed. “Good Lord.” Ginny eyed her in the mirror. “What did they tell you in school, sweetie?”
It turned out to be the usual hodgepodge of ancient pseudoscience and emphasis on abstinence the evangelical troglodytes had inflicted on any school that needed federal funding, and quite a few of the rest besides. Fifteen minutes later, much better informed, Steph accepted three foil-wrapped squares Ginny dug out of her purse.
“Don’t keep them in a pocket, body heat degrades them.” Ginny held the girl’s gaze, steadily. Her scalp tingled from brushing her hair. Who knew when the next warm shower would be? “And remember, even if you don’t catch pregnant you can get a disease, so use them. If Mark doesn’t want to, then not even a kiss for him. Promise me.”
“Yes ma’am.” Steph’s blue eyes were huge. “Miz Ginny, ma’am?” She crumpled the condom packets in her palm, and Ginny was hard-pressed not to smile. “Does it hurt? I heard it hurts like fire the first time.”