But after Katie changed, after he was changed, and Lucca was born sick, he felt his fragility, the luckiness of all those years he had coasted along through life. Sooner or later, something would come calling for him. This could be it. It had come calling for Selena a lot sooner.
Now that he had a map and a sense of their position in the world, he needed more than this short-barrel rifle with far too few rounds. There had to be guns and ammunition somewhere in these houses on Rose. Unenthusiastic about going outside again, he looked out the front windows. The zombie kid was gone to a backyard, farther down the road, or to some other road altogether. No one else was coming along.
Anyone roaming down Acton Parkway was going to see him, however. The best course of action was to go through the backyards. Selena couldn’t hang out by the door to lock and unlock it for him, so it would stay unlocked and he wouldn’t stray more than a block from the little yellow house. He would leave the gate closed.
He wrote a note explaining where he was going and set it on the coffee table. Water and snacks were within her reach. If she needed the bathroom . . . he added diapers to the table, and a small trashcan beside it. She was mature for fourteen. She’d understand it wasn’t an insult, just a reality of her lack of strength for the journey to the bathroom. In case she did feel like reading, he snagged a few paperbacks that looked teen-level from the shelves of books in the entryway.
Last of all, he included a knife from the kitchen. She wasn’t going to win a battle with anything fiercer than a newborn kitten, but at least she’d have something with which to try.
He brushed a lock of hair from her forehead and whispered, “I’m going, but I’ll be back soon.” She was dreaming, her eyes moving behind the lids. He shuffled on his knees to the glass door and rolled it open.
“Okay, Dad,” Selena whispered in her sleep, and he left her behind.
Chapter Seven
He made it back to the yard by afternoon, feeling like he was toting gold in the backpack. Food and water, a better map than the first, matches and flashlights and a pair of binoculars, he also had a belt holster and three handguns. The revolver had only three cartridges in its cylinder, but that was three shots he wasn’t going to pass by. The other two were fully loaded semi-automatic pistols.
He had wanted a shotgun or something equally impressive, and more magazines for his rifle, yet he felt a lot better with the little he had. One of his new guns had been under a mattress, and the other on a high shelf in a closet. Ridiculously, he had come across the revolver while looking for food in a kitchen cabinet. It had just been sitting there atop the dusty cans of soup. Whoever once lived in that home had been an oddball. The gun on the soup was par for the course. There was a plasma television in the hallway, a bizarre location unless one intended to watch it from the toilet. And that was apparently what the owner had done. The remote was still sitting on the sink and the door was propped open. On the messy floor of the bedroom had been a knot of belts, and Xan had unwound the one that he was wearing now. He was going to affix the holster to it and put a handgun inside.
In the hours he had been gone, he encountered three zombies. One had been dead for so long that grass had grown over what was left of it. The second and third were wandering around Lilac, which was where Rose terminated. Xan had nearly had a disaster at the last house he planned to search: he’d dropped into the backyard just as a zombie staggered down the driveway. He got back over the fence in the nick of time and watched through a crack in the boards. There was a filthy green, older hybrid sitting in the carport that he wanted to check out. A back window was cracked open. The gas in the tank wouldn’t be good, but if the battery still had a charge, then they had a car.
The zombie had entered the backyard and roamed around for so long that Xan had called it quits and doubled back. Of the dozen houses he’d tried to enter, five had been locked up tight. Three had unlocked back doors. The last four were locked but had open windows, or windows that were closed but not locked. The semi-automatic pistols had come from the same home, but try as he might, he couldn’t find additional ammunition for them. It either didn’t exist, or was hidden so well that he hadn’t stumbled over it.
Selena was awake and overjoyed to have him back. Throwing him side-eye when he took a water gun out of the backpack, she said, “Is that supposed to be for me?”
He pressed on the tab to make sure it wasn’t leaking. “If you drop it, it’s no big deal. Just shoot at their faces if needed. It’s filled with chili powder and water and oil, a bunch of nasty things that should make their eyes burn.”
“I can do that.” She took the gun. Her energy was up again. Neither made mention of the diaper in the trashcan.
“I have an idea about how to get us closer to Newgreen,” Xan said. “If I can get this car that’s one street over to work, it could shorten the distance by two miles. Two miles at most, unfortunately, and not going too fast.”
“But they’ll be able to see us through the windows.”
“Not if we go at night, and not if I cover them up. I just need a piece of the windshield to see out of. I’m going to head back over there. If I can get to it, if it works, I’ll drive over here to get you.”
“Okay.”
He had thought she’d argue. But that was how desperate their situation was. To have a possible means to move them two miles was exciting him. It wouldn’t ferry Xan and Selena to Newgreen, but it would get them much closer to the edge of Delanto.
Within an hour, he was peeking through the crack in the fence to that older model hybrid. It was a Korus. Jenner had had one just like it, only in a different color, and bored Xan and Koby to tears with details of its features.
The zombie had wandered off. Dropping into the backyard, Xan made his way across the grass to the house. The back door was locked. Going to a window of a kid’s bedroom, he removed the screen. It had an ancient turn latch, and only the edge of the metal curl was locking it shut. He jostled the window around and then gripped the upper half of the window and tugged it down. That did the trick and he entered the home. The keys were within a purse in the living room.
Then he was at the car. When he pressed the unlock button on the key fob, there was a snap. The battery was still responsive. He opened the door and got in.
His backpack was stuffed with items from the daycare. Taping up construction paper over the inside of the back windshield first, he then moved to the side windows in the back seat. The motion of the car would excite them, but the metallic flesh of the frame when they caught up would send them away. The quiet engine would also help to conceal Xan’s passage through Delanto. If it worked.
He covered up the side windows in the front seats and carried on with the windshield. There he left himself an open strip to see from, and made a paper flap that he could push up over it and seal with tape. For another line of defense, he clipped wire hangers and taped them up in cross sections beside the construction paper on the side windows. If zombies broke through, the net of wires would hold them up for a few seconds more.
Then he got out of the car after peering down the driveway to the empty street. The olive oil from the daycare pantry was poured over the roof and trunk. He smeared it around with a bath towel until the hybrid was coated in slime. Dropping the towel, he climbed back in.
The light was draining from the sky. While he waited, he studied the map like he had never studied anything in his life. Fallen trees, hordes of zombies, he needed a route and a back-up route and a back-up for the back-up. He stared at the street names until he knew the southwestern quarter of Delanto like the back of his hand. Then it was time to go.
Please, God. His hand rested on the key within the ignition. Please.
He turned the key.
The car started.
It wasn’t a healthy sound, but it started. The headlights snapped on with the ignition. He rolled up the cracked window, locked the doors, and shifted into reverse. Then he eased down the driveway. The back window was shie
lded with paper and he couldn’t see the mirrors, so he kept the car moving perfectly straight until it dipped down into the street. Steering through Lilac, he turned onto Rose going only a few miles an hour.
When he got to the house, he turned into the driveway and leaped out to run to the back. But the front door opened and Selena appeared, holding onto the frame for support and clutching her water gun. A chair was behind her. She had dragged that chair to the entryway to wait for him, something that had probably taken her as much time as it had taken him to tape paper over the windows. He was filled with fresh fury at the hospital staff member to put her in the bait truck without enough drugs in her system to kill her. That act had been nothing short of hateful.
He scooped her up and returned to the car, but the passenger door was locked and dripping with oil. He remembered that just before he put his hand on it. He carried her to the driver’s side, swung in her legs, and whispered, “Keep them out so you can get over to your seat.” Her entry into the car didn’t go smoothly, but it went.
The car could die at any second. He got in, closed the door, and pulled out of the driveway. Not keen on being in reverse again, the car made a horrific sound. But it kept moving. Breathing hard, Selena held her gun in her lap. They rocked with the car as it lowered to the road and pushed up with its gentle curve.
It was very weird to be driving after so long. He turned onto Acton Parkway, the illuminated dashboard showing him each tenth of a mile to go by. A warning light was on, which he studiously looked away from. The headlights showed an empty road ahead. The car grumbled along it at fifteen miles an hour, going past the flower street names that ended with Amaryllis.
The first zombie appeared at five-tenths of a mile, which Xan considered miraculous. Stepping off the curb, the headlights catching on a bare leg, the man staggered for the car. Selena gasped at the thump of hands coming down on her window. Xan kept driving, nudging the steering wheel to the left. It sounded like the zombie tumbled to the ground after trying to get hold of the slimy back.
Half a mile closer to Newgreen. He wanted to stay on Acton Parkway as long as he could. It was the straightest shot south. Pulling around a car left in the lane with all four of its doors hanging open, he watched out the gap in the construction paper intently.
The streets of modest houses had ended. The car’s lights were glinting off plate glass windows of stores now. Trash scuttled about with the breeze, something plastic crunching under the tires. They had gone seven-tenths of a mile. The stores quickly gave off to an industrial area, massive buildings pushed back behind equally massive parking lots. Human shapes stood there. Then he lost sight of them from his gap.
Nine-tenths of a mile.
He was coasting through stop signs and non-working lights. There had been a car accident further down on Acton, so he swung into a parking lot to go around it. Then they bumped down the outlet and were back on their way.
Within moments, he noticed the car was slowing. His eyes flicked to the odometer, which had just reached one mile. This was not the place for the car to die. The closest buildings were several hundred feet from the road, and shapes were moving in the shadows.
They should have done this on foot. But it was too late for that now.
Selena didn’t have a gap in the paper to look from, and what she could see through his wasn’t much. After a few peeks, she stopped trying and sat very still. The car continued to roll past another tenth of a mile. A three-way intersection was coming up, and that had to be Acton Parkway and Simmons. He made a split second decision and turned right onto Simmons. A left-hand turn would take him to Gardner, and Gardner led to dozens of short, curving streets on the map. Those could only be residential. Even if they fell short of them, anything was better than the industrial parks.
Two-tenths. Parking lots stretched out on both sides of the road.
Three-tenths. He coasted past the giant buildings. One was a medical center. The blue insignia on the wall had to be powered by solar because it was still glowing over this dead world.
Half a mile. He turned onto Gardner and willed the car to keep going. To have some kick left to the fuel that would take them all the way home. Now shops loomed up tall on either side of the somewhat narrow street. He weaved around cars, passed through an intersection, moved to the clear right lane, and watched the odometer. The grade changed, going up instead of flat, and the car didn’t appreciate it.
They passed a Brain Freeze. Katie had hankered after those milkshakes and the two of them had gone there at least twice a month.
A boutique. The shelves were still full of undisturbed statuary.
A Chinese restaurant. Daily Specials Inside.
A temp office. Now hiring!
A bagel place. Everything half-off after two p.m.
Seventy-two hours. God, it was not the time to think about it. Whether his son had lived or died, they were on the other side of the waiting period. He felt an impression of Katie’s hand in his from a memory of walking down a street, and the impression of Lucca’s hand, which was consigned to hope. Both faded away as he gripped the steering wheel harder and drove through this spooky block of forgotten stores.
Selena was very good at reading what he needed. She never uttered a sound or even shifted in her seat. He wanted to reassure her, but frankly, he needed someone to be reassuring him. He could feel the mechanical malaise in this car, which he anthropomorphized into shock that it was actually being driven somewhere after taking its premature retirement. The car had been happy to senesce in that driveway, it had given up the vitality in its gas and collected age lines in the dust, and now it was slathered in oil and being pressed to climb up this road, and it did not like it one bit.
Seven-tenths. The crowded stores stopped as abruptly as they had started, and the road widened to include two more lanes. He passed a gas station and park and climbed ever upwards. His brain locked and wouldn’t let him think of what roads came next. The names weren’t important. Houses were, or shops, any structure that could hold them.
The headlights shined on large pieces of plastic caught in bushes. This had been a drop point somewhere along the line. He didn’t want the car to quit here, imagining the zombies could still smell the scent of old blood.
A face loomed in the light. A zombie was standing in the trees on the far side of the gas station. A second one was crumpled up in the grass and possibly sleeping. Xan’s last glimpse of the upright zombie was of the guy starting for the car. It poked along at a speed that he was afraid to confirm.
At eight-tenths of a mile, they rattled over a bridge and rounded a hill. The lanes had shrunk back to two. He came around a blind curve, the odometer slipping from eight to nine, and stamped on the brakes. His arm whipped out and caught Selena from rocking into the dashboard. There were cars parked crazily in the road. They had throttled it from end to end, and Xan could go no further. Nor did this car have the juice to back up and go around. It made a warning huff as he pulled forward the last few feet between them and the abandoned cars.
The headlights pushed through the windows of those cars to the road behind. Figures stood within it, eerily lit up. Xan snapped off the headlights and secured the flap. Then they waited, Selena with her water gun and Xan with a handgun. The seat shifted beneath him and metal twanged loudly.
Scratching.
He had a sudden, sharp memory of being within a store. It was a Big Bags. There was one only a block away from the elementary school. He had gone in and . . . all he remembered was the aisle of cereal, and a woman at the far end looking at him and screaming. He had bitten someone in that aisle to pass on the infection, and she had seen him do it. Now she was running. The parasites drove him to spread their disease further, to run after that woman. The memory stopped there.
Being out in hell called up things that needed to remain buried deep in his subconscious. When he was surrounded by tomatoes, or coaxing the baby to eat more, those things didn’t creep up to surprise him very often. Katie di
d, though, the ghost in the apartment, the ghost in the gardens, the frightened ghost in the back seat of this very car.
Cold fingers crept over his leg. He squeezed Selena’s hand as scratching approached his side of the car. If the zombies got past the glass and wires, he would have to start shooting. The noise would bring more and more . . . he’d pick up Selena and run, and that was how the two of them were going to die.
Someone was rubbing the car, and then patting it. They were inches, sheer inches, away from Xan. But they couldn’t see him nor could they smell him, so they would investigate this car and go away. A stopped car with an invisible driver would not have piqued his curiosity for long when he had been like that. However, if he had smelled something . . .
They couldn’t smell him. The puncture on his finger was well bandaged, and he hadn’t bled onto the fabric clipped to his head. He had taken a look at the house on Rose and had Selena put the clips back in.
The car moved. Someone had bumped into the hood. The first one was still by Xan’s door, patting the glass and making a strange sound with his finger or fist in the ooze. Selena jumped as the car trembled. Scratching went to her side.
He reminded himself not to run out of bullets in a vain effort to break free. One for her, one for him, right to the head and oblivion.
There were four zombies around the car. Four minimum. One scratched at the window like a frantic cat wanting in. The car dipped and then there was a thump. Someone had tried to climb up on the hood and promptly slid off. Another climbed up on the trunk. Then there was a crack and the car rocked violently. Xan was sure that the zombie had attempted to climb up onto the roof, but slipped and struck the window. He wanted to know if the glass was broken, but there was no way to tell unless a zombie fell into the car.
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