Late the next night
Jack hated I-10. Despised it. Like a straight shot through hell, it arrowed through the desert with barely a break. Traveling at night, he was making good time, though, far better than he had expected. Becka and Ellie were two days behind him now, buried in makeshift graves on the side of the freeway. He hoped he had gone deep enough to keep them away from the animals, but he wasn’t sure. He tried not to think about it.
He was all alone now. Squeezing his eyes shut, he fought back the tears that had marked his existence since burying the last of his family. It worked this time, but just barely.
The truck he was driving, an ancient Ford F-250, hummed along the ruler-straight highway like a cruise missile. The undead hordes of Albuquerque were far behind now, and surprisingly, he had seen very few since getting on the Interstate. The lack of zombies bothered him, but he wasn’t about to complain, not after Albuquerque. In places, he was forced to slow down to navigate around sand dunes that were growing across the roadway. The marks of man wouldn’t last long without maintenance, he realized. Still, he was surprised with the speed at which it was degrading.
The truck downshifted as he began the climb into the Dragoon mountain range. Large boulders, some the size of houses, some larger, loomed on either the side of the road. Jack cringed at the idea of being trapped in the boulder field with a pack of the undead on his heels. It would be a nightmare of blind corners and innumerable death traps. A few minutes later, the motor stopped whining, and he began the descent. Tucson was only twenty miles ahead.
Thumbing the radio on, he pushed the scan button, and let the tuner cycle through the frequencies, searching for any hint of a signal. The digital display rolled through all available frequencies twice before he gave up and thumbed it off. He hadn’t expected anything, but it was worth a try. Tucson. Jack hadn’t been there in years, not since his early college days when he had dated a girl from the University of Arizona for a few months.
He had good memories of the place, having visited in February, when the weather was at its finest. He supposed it was nothing like that these days; it was probably overrun with the undead, trash everywhere, corpses lining the streets.
This close to town, the possibility of encountering a stray zombie on the road was much higher. As a precaution, he dropped his speed from fifty to forty and strained to look down the road ahead. On several occasions he thought he saw movement in the desert, dark wraiths gliding through the scrub, but he never stopped to investigate. The fuckers could wander around out here until they rotted away to dust as far as he was concerned.
Ten miles. Signs of civilization were becoming more frequent. He slowed again, dropping to thirty miles per hour. He scanned the road, expecting the worst at any moment. Nothing. Then, he saw something ahead that changed everything.
Lights. More than one. Moving. Bobbing. Heading west.
He gunned it.
Twenty-Seven
Fire: The Collapse Page 27