“Where’s Jacklyn? And Dakota?” someone asked in the bus.
“Wesley? Has anyone seen Wesley?”
“Silent Steve! Board the bus,” Scarlett ordered.
From this height, Quade saw out the little windows along the top of the garage door. They showed only the part of the garden that was near the open gate. Deadheads scuttled over bodies. Once the bar was out of the way, he’d have to scramble up to the roof and hold on. All there was to hold up there were the three tiny lights over the side of the front.
“No!” Scarlett was saying inside. “Tanya, Tucker, leave the rest of those drapes up.” She was speaking through coughs. A lick of orange was to the left of the garage windows, fire eating at the wall of the house. Her fit of coughs passing, Scarlett shouted, “Hey! Hey, whoever you are. Once you drop the bar, get inside.”
There wasn’t going to be time for that. “Close the doors. I’ll go up to the roof.” The doors hissed closed.
The bar was heavy, and it didn’t want to come up. He was at a weird angle to lift it as well, crouched over in a sprinter’s position to get his fingers underneath it. Grunting, he pushed.
The bar moved up and a line of light entered the garage, the door swinging out an inch and swinging back in from the deadheads punching and pulling at it. Quade pushed up higher and swung the bar away.
“Huh-huh-HUH. Huh-huh-huh-HUH. HUH!”
Quade never wanted to hear a ringer chuckling again. He was done with this. Once he got back to Crosica, it was for good. The hunt could pass to someone else and he’d have his burgers and build or farm, tend babies or cows, do whatever they wanted. Add some rocks to the memorial garden for Grady and his dad because they were gone. Gone and leaving Quade alone in this world. But if he died doing this hunt, no one was going to remember them. Quade had to set down those rocks.
Scarlett drew the bus forward, pushing at the door with the bumper. It didn’t want to open with the weight on the other side, not until the deadheads realized the door was opening and moved. A head appeared in the widening crack. Quade scrambled up the hood and hoisted himself onto the roof of the bus.
None too soon, as the deadhead leaped like a wild cat onto the hood. The bus slowed momentarily and Quade thought go, go, go! Scarlett came to the same conclusion and the bus lurched forward, shoving the door aside and revealing the garden and driveway. Quade pulled out a Glock and shot the deadhead, who was creeping up the hood with his gray eyes fixed to the window. Rather than fall off the bus, the dead body sprawled over the hood like a saddle.
They surrounded the vehicle on all sides. Scarlett pushed forward relentlessly, driving right into them when they didn’t move. Quade’s hands closed over the nubs of lights and the bus swung right to curl along with the driveway.
A gun fired and the bullet passed through the windshield. The chaos from inside spilled out. Crying, screaming, shouts to duck, English and Spanish spilling from tongues rapid-fire. Quade looked out for the ringer. It was either the boy or there was some other one out there.
Oh God, let me get to Crosica. Let me lay down those rocks by the one for Hope. Let me sit alone at that table in the diner. Maybe I’ll even tell everyone my name isn’t actually Hey You.
The bus jounced over deadheads. Quade clung on. Praying.
Chapter Five
Scarlett was being deafened by the noise in the bus. If they were under ten years old, they were crying at the top of their lungs. She couldn’t blame them. Elena had Doug wrapped around her chest like a monkey, both of them swaying with the bus since the seats were taken. Her hand clasped the pole to keep from tipping down the stairs and he was clutching his stuffed cat with an equal amount of desperation. Although Shirley was lost in the thickets of people and dimness, her wails carried up to the front. For a second, Scarlett wanted to throw her out to the deadheads. In the next second, she retracted the thought. She wouldn’t wish that death on anyone. Besides, she had to drive.
The brightness of the sun was as bad as the noise. The sun was going down, shafts of light piercing through the trees and straight into Scarlett’s eyes. She squinted and focused on the driveway directly ahead. Deadheads scrabbled at the sides of the bus, seeking purchase.
Mark had passed out in the aisle, from fear or low blood sugar or blood loss. Others were trying to reach the kid so he didn’t get trampled. It turned out to be blood loss, the bullet that went through the window also passing through his shoulder. Bridger was yelling for anyone with a gun to hand it over, so he could take point by the driver’s seat. The bus went up and down and up and down, and Scarlett prayed that man on the roof wasn’t getting thrown off. She hadn’t seen where the shot came from.
In all of the wailing and pounding and yelling was a weak baaaaa and a reply of it’s okay, little lambie!
“Fisher?” Scarlett yelled, not daring to hope, and then she screamed, “Fisher?”
A sandy-brown head pushed through to the front. The little black ewe was pressed to the girl’s chest. Scarlett screamed a second time to see Fisher, unhurt and here in the bus with everyone else, not a pile of bones picked clean in the barn.
Holding onto the other pole, Fisher said, “I didn’t want them to hurt the lamb! So I picked her up out of the pen and brought her inside the garage to hide with us.” The bus jounced and Fisher staggered, Scarlett unable to reach back and steady her. More bodies were in the garden than on the driveway, but the live ones were in the way. Scarlett pressed her foot to the gas and moved through. Fisher kept both her balance and the lamb, but just barely. Her arm came around Scarlett, not to hug her but to brush a maggot off her shirt.
“Give me a gun!” Bridger was demanding.
“I got mine and it’s loaded,” Fisher yelled. He shoved through and took hers. Then he crouched down by Scarlett, one hand on the back of her seat and scanning outside for the shooter.
On the roof, the man was firing at deadheads. The one slung across the hood fell off from the rocking of the bus at the same moment another one running in their direction went down in a bloody heap at the edge of the driveway. Scarlett thought you asshole to the deadhead, since it crushed one of her heirloom tomato plants. Not hers any longer. They were getting the fuck out of this place. Where exactly, Scarlett would think about later. If they even made it through to have a later.
Three deadheads got hold of the hood, two on the right side and one on the left. A bullet passed through the neck of the one on the left, sending out a spray of pinkish blood. For seconds, he held on defiantly to the mirror. The loss of blood and ability to get oxygen to his lungs claimed its toll and he dropped. Scarlett was tempted to swerve and throw off the other two, but she didn’t want to spill the man off with them. She moved gracefully to the right to avoid going over a body, the tires on that side dipping off the driveway to the dirt but pulling back on immediately.
The deadheads forced their way slowly up the hood. It wasn’t a great distance to the windshield, but it was up a slope. Scarlett drove over the leg of a fallen one, unable to avoid it. The driveway was a sea of red with grayish streaks.
Pound. Pound. Pound. Reflected in the mirrors were zombies on both sides. One threw himself bodily under a back tire to stop the bus, which just went over him. Glass broke, screams breaking out in the back and one of the men diving over the seats with a knife to stab the hand coming in.
A deadhead stepped in the path of a bus, attempted to scale the grill, lost hold and went under it. The bus bumped up and down. The deadheads on the hood made the windshield and stared in to Scarlett. One male, one female, both were half-dressed and their color of skin indiscernible under layers of muck and blood. Scarlett had a hard time thinking of them as men and women in this state. The male had stretched out earlobes. The man wasn’t shooting these two, but with the ungainly movements of the bus, he was probably engaged in holding on.
The bus was halfway down the driveway now, passing the corn that had been stomped flat. The female deadhead stuck her finger into the bullet hol
e in the glass. Shifting Doug to her hip, Elena stretched out and cut the finger off with a knife. It fell down the steps to the doors. Bridger shielded his eyes from the glare to see out.
The male hoisted himself up to the roof and staggered back from the crack of a fist. Blackened feet sliding down the glass, he pushed up again while the female slugged the window.
“I don’t want to risk shattering this whole thing,” Bridger said, his gun pointed at the woman. Scarlett didn’t want to shatter it either. The male made it up to the roof and thumps echoed down into the bus.
“Get it out of here!” Shirley was screaming. A deadhead was climbing through the broken window in the back. Blades flashed and it was shoved out. Scarlett saw it go out in the mirror, tumbling into the road and rolling away. The house was on fire.
The female struck the window hard, her mouth open and tasting Scarlett already. The next time her fist went back, Scarlett stomped on the brakes. The man yelled on top, a series of thumps going worryingly to the edge. The female deadhead was caught off-balance by the abrupt rocking and tumbled back onto her ass.
Scarlett begged the man not to fall. The female rolled off the hood entirely and Scarlett sped up to run her over.
Baylen stepped out from behind a tree, the gun in his hand. He was close to the gate. If he thought to close it, Scarlett wasn’t going fast enough to break through those metal bars. Her heart stuttered and she said, “We might need you to shoot anyway, Bridger.”
The retired psychiatrist was white at her side. Rather than shoot through the windshield, he moved aside a drape and opened the top half of a window in the first row. Leaning out, he first shot down to kill the deadhead there and then out to Baylen. The thumping continued on the roof.
Baylen pulled the trigger, not for Scarlett or Bridger but the tires. Forgive me, stranger, Scarlett thought to the man, and hit the gas.
Everything happened very fast.
Bridger cried out from deadheads pulling him out of the window. Fisher dropped the lamb and Elena dropped Doug to grab Bridger’s legs. The gun retorted, once, twice, three times for the front tires of the bus, Scarlett swerving from side to side. Blood sprayed over the people in the back in the bus, sunlight glinting off Silent Steve’s axe and yet another deadhead’s body going out the window.
Colton James. If Silent Steve died and she didn’t somehow, Scarlett had to remember the little he’d told her. She would remember all of them.
The male deadhead flew off the roof, landing with a crack on the hood and bouncing off. Something thumped hard above and the nameless man shouted, “Go!”
A bloody Bridger was pulled back in, still with the gun in his shredded hand. The bus jounced over the deadhead. Baylen fired and Scarlett floored it. The bus shot through the last of the garden and nailed the ringer dead on.
The kid flew like a bird and crashed onto the driveway outside the gate. He met Scarlett’s eyes. His were open and pleading, all the charm of the boy he once had been. He held up a hand for help.
She drove over him.
The bus raced down the last of the driveway to the road, Scarlett’s teeth chattering from the bodies going under the wheels. People fell all over each other and the seats. The lamb released another weak baaaa of protest, its hooves clattering as it staggered up to the driver’s seat. Doug was down on the floor, sliding everywhere with his hands and the stuffed cat over his head in a modification of earthquake drill formation.
The sun was at the worst possible level in the sky. She slowed to turn out into the road. The mirrors showed deadheads coming after the bus, but stopping to investigate the body of the ringer. Then they savaged it, two and four, now six of them while she turned. Scarlett shouted, “Fisher, get the lamb!” It was about to fall down the steps. Fisher scrambled over the floor and caught it around the midsection. She drew it back into her lap and hauled Doug over to Elena, who had taken off her own shirt to bind it around Bridger’s mutilated hand.
Bodies were strewn through the trees. Up ahead, a van was in a ditch with its doors open. More deadheads and a ringer were in the road, all of them still and some eaten. No one was currently feeding on them, and the road past this scene of carnage had nothing standing in their way.
They had gotten out. God almighty, they had gotten out of there. Scarlett couldn’t bear to do a headcount, although she was seeing at least forty people in the rows. Since there weren’t as many bodies to the right side of the road as there were in the center, she hugged over to the side.
Something thumped on the roof. Her throat closed, knowing it was another deadhead, until Bridger said faintly, “Scarlett! The man!”
She hit the brakes. The man came down hard in front of the windshield. Opening the doors, Scarlett yelled at him to come in. He ran to the van and let himself inside the back. Getting out of the seat, Scarlett charged down the steps and shouted, “Hey, get in here! We can’t tow your vehicle!”
“I know!” He came out with two pouches and guns. “More ammo.”
“Scarlett! They’re coming this way!” Silent Steve bellowed. Deadheads were bypassing the ringer’s body. Scarlett and the man piled into the bus fast and got the doors closed. She took her seat and accelerated, watching the deadheads get smaller and smaller in the mirrors.
By rote, her hands turned the steering wheel to go into town. There had to be a hotel in one of the cities around here where they could crash until the safe hours tomorrow. People were staring at the unfamiliar man, who said nervously, “Uh, hi.”
“You’re not a ringer, are you?” Fisher asked, keeping some distance between them.
“No, I’m not a ringer,” the man said. “I’m a hunter.”
“What’s your name?”
“People usually just call me Hey You, sometimes Big Guy or Buddy.”
The bus shot through the stop signs and defunct lights. Scarlett decided to head south and see what they found. “I think we have a moment now for you to tell us your real name.”
The man put a hand to the pole to keep his balance. The bus rattled to the on-ramp. “Nuh-uh, go north. I know where there are people. A safe place.”
“Nowhere is safe.”
“This place is. It’s got everything you had back there at that ranch, just with six thousand more people. Up in Oregon.”
Scarlett spared him a glance, chose to trust him, and changed lanes to go north. She wasn’t going to call him Hey You. “I’ll need directions, Mr.-”
“I’ll give them.” He put a hand to Scarlett’s shoulder and squeezed. “Quade. I’m Quade. Let me take you home.”
THE END
ZOMBIE CHILD
by Macaulay C. Hunter
Chapter One
“She’s having an episode.”
Everyone jolted into action at Janice’s warning. They had been well trained. Twelve-year-old Judy leaped to the sofa and swept the cat up into her arms, charging away for the laundry room with Snuggle Butt’s protests trailing over her shoulder. The front door flew open and banged shut, ten-year-old Marquis and his older half-brother Mason at a pell-mell sprint for the neighbors’ house so they didn’t get triggered into a chain reaction. Corey got up without a hint of his usual teenaged attitude and raced to close the windows and pull the bars. In a scant five seconds, the television was playing to an empty living room.
Janice turned it off and went to the kitchen, where she began to lock the cabinets and move everything breakable to the top of the refrigerator. When Holly had an episode, she destroyed whatever was in reach. In the hotbed of germs that was the elementary school, a new cold was being passed along in tiny coughs and sneezes. It would have been better to keep Holly out of class until the virus reaped its last victim and moved on, but if Janice did that every time something was going around, Holly would miss more school than she attended. Sometimes Janice did keep her out preemptively, but mostly just to have the pleasant company of a quiet but friendly child, one who always wanted to hold her hand when they crossed a street and thrilled
at the grocery store register to collect the rattling coins ejected from the change machine.
Daniel wasn’t back from his work trip, not due home until tomorrow afternoon. He kept a cool head even in the craziest of times, and these infrequent episodes were definitely crazy. If Holly got too wild, he’d be the one to take down the restraints and fix them to her bed. Janice hated tying down the children. Hated it. She’d rather clean up the messes and dodge the blows than pin them to the sheets, raving and spitting and shrieking, while someone else clapped on the wrist and ankle cuffs. When her biological son and daughter had had the sniffles years ago, they’d spent the days at home watching movies and taking turns reading chapter books. That had been a sweet time, and Janice hadn’t known just how sweet until it was over. There was no such sweetness with her five foster children when they became ill.
Her cell phone vibrated with a text from Alice. We’ve got the boys. Good luck. Mason and Marquis couldn’t see or hear Holly this way. The last time they had, Janice had gone from one child having an episode to three in minutes. The older they got, the more destruction they could wreak, and Mason especially was getting bigger by the day. Janice didn’t respond to the text, nor was a response expected. When one of Alice’s five foster kids had an episode, she sent her two susceptible ones over to Janice’s to weather it. The house was cramped enough, and their application for new housing was approved but still being processed. Having two extra kids for days at a time made it chaos.
Janice wrote a swift 911E text to Daniel. The house was filled with two sets of thumping, one belonging to Corey as the bars were drawn over the windows in each room, and the other was Holly banging against her closed bedroom door. Snuggle Butt was yowling in the laundry room at the indignity of his unprovoked banishment. Judy would stay in there with him, having filled a bottom cabinet with water, food, and extra clothes until it was safe to come out. There was a beanbag wedged in the closet for her to sleep on. The laundry room had an attached bathroom with a litter box as well, and a window she could climb out to get to school tomorrow. An introverted child, she rather liked being in there rather than in her shared room with Holly. Her books lived in a neat pile in there all the time.
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