by Duncan, Ian
He talked to the General one night, finally dialing the private number from a hotel room, more than two years since he’d seen the man. He found himself crying though he was barely drunk, like confessing after some long stint of unbelief, and Trubilinski gave him the address of his own sister in Corpus Christi and told him she and her husband had a little piece of land there, that they were good people—the kind of people who understood—and that they could use his help and that he’d sent several young men there fresh from war, that he’d spent several summers there himself. Cole thanked him, wrote down the address, and cried himself to sleep.
He called Shelley on the outskirts of Little Rock, where he’d stopped for a cup of coffee, bending forward over the wheel due to the shortness of the charging cord, listening to it ring, and then the android-like voice of the greeting, not even the satisfaction of hearing her voice. He didn’t leave a message this time, although he was careful in hanging up the phone, careful not to make some noise by tossing it on the seat beside him, lest she interpret that as some form of anger. He tapped the red icon and the life seemed to die out of the screen, turning gray, and the very air seemed to lose some precious electricity, open, as it had been, for that one moment all the way to the nautiloid curvature of Shelley’s ear. She never returned his calls and he didn’t expect her to or resent her for it, but sometimes, late at night, she would answer and they would talk, in low tones and without any preamble, as though they were still together in the zone, or as though the zone were a place that could never be fully left behind, much the same way that cemeteries must be visited occasionally or the dead roused by séance, but the best thing about it was that they never tried to make small talk or to pretend that none of it had happened, and in that way each was the other’s only true therapist, but it was always a conversation held in a graveyard, and they both understood and had agreed, at least in principle, that there could be no new life in a thing forever marked by death.
Cole drove on through the night without sleeping. He stopped for a second and third cup of coffee. Time and miles became meaningless. Scenes from his life played before his eyes on the flickering gray asphalt in a kind of sleep-deprived, caffeine-enhanced vision. On the west side of Dallas, sometime in the late afternoon, the reverie was broken when a woman in a ripped t-shirt stepped into the road in a blind curve, and when Cole jerked the wheel and checked his tire against the curb he lost the sandwich he’d been eating, one big circular bite taken from the bun, and the slice of tomato landing face down in the grit of the passenger-side floor mat, where it would never be retrieved.
The Jeep’s tires screeched with an involuntary scream Cole was too shocked to emit himself, and he had barely snapped the wheel back to correct his course when they came at him from a side street, charging in a tight crowd that could have been the first wave of a marathon but for the way they ran, without an athlete’s form or discipline, coming on like animals, their heads down and mouths open, coughing furiously, gasping and running, hands clawing the air.
They wanted something from Cole and they wanted it with a fury: the uncorrupted air in his lungs, his life, his separateness from them; all this must be rectified at once. They needed no leader to spur them on. They shared the same zombie mind. They would wreak their furious vision of unity upon the world until every man, woman, and child succumbed to it.
Cole accelerated through the first and second body to strike the Jeep. Their heads, bumper-jerked, left huge dents in the hood, bouncing off, arms flailing. Another cougher tumbled over the front grille, spiderwebbing the windshield on impact and grabbing at the wipers before Cole yanked the wheel and sent the man flying, a feat that could have made the career of any stuntman had it only not had the unfortunate consequence of being absolutely real.
The Jeep’s side view mirrors were torn away, electrical wires dangling like spurting veins, and a schmear of blood marred Cole’s vision through the cracked windshield, but the four-by-four’s stiff suspension kept gobbling up the coughers like so many speed bumps. Cole swore when he stomped the brake and nothing happened—an instant to realize he was hydroplaning on zombies before the mass of them suddenly parted and Cole glimpsed the unflinching silhouette of a steel light post.
Airbags mushroomed all around him with the release of CO2, the explosion loud as a gunshot. Not until much later would he remember hitting the taut surface of the airbag, face first, or the whiplash censure of the lap and shoulder belts that would leave a sash of purple bruises across his torso. For a moment it seemed his back was broken, because he couldn’t resist slumping to the left, and his head felt like it weighed one hundred pounds. A horrible screeching noise reached him, the sound of the belts under friction in the engine compartment, burning up, the engine finally shuddering and seizing.
He began to understand that the Jeep was lying on its side. His neck was not broken. It was only gravity and the seatbelt, choked tight, restraining him. He reached for the bright red seat belt button at his hip, but the belt would not release no matter how hard he depressed the button with his thumb. His neck was already aching from the effort to hold it upright.
It was at this moment that the first sound from outside the Jeep reached him, though at first he could hardly understand why it should terrify him the way it did. His mind, still shaken, seemed to be floating sluggishly, like a jellyfish in a bowl of water. But this was a sound Cole knew, a sound no one who survived the quarantine zone could ever forget.
It was the sound of running feet. Many running feet.
Three
HANDS WERE ALREADY BEATING at the windows of the overturned Jeep. Cole could well imagine a hundred or more coughers surrounding the SUV before the tires had even stopped spinning. He thought of the guns first; he would either be ready when they broke through the windows or the Jeep would be his coffin. For a moment he panicked, irrationally straining against the seatbelt, the tight synthetic weave strong as steel, and then he reached for the side pocket of his cargo pants, where he could feel with one finger the knurled edge of the Carson flipper he carried there, one of the habits his psychiatrist had informed him were signs of hypervigilance and a “sense of limited future,” both of which had always struck Cole as the very basis for a survival strategy.
The blows at the windshield and windows suddenly redoubled: the deflating airbags had allowed them to see him moving inside now, and the sight of their prey seemed to excite them, registering among them like a sudden tremor through a swarm of bees.
Cole managed to lock open the blade and slide it under the seat belt, unnerved by how unsteady his hands were, how pale and bloodless. He could barely feel his fingers gripping the knife, but he forced himself to focus on the bright serrations of the knife’s leading edge, sawing away from his leg. He had mastered this fight or flight response before, and knew how it robbed him of dexterity, all his blood pumping into the major muscle groups to facilitate running like hell or beating the shit out of someone, neither of which was likely to get him out of his current predicament.
Even before he had sawn completely through the belt he had already visualized how he would crawl through the overturned Jeep to reach his bag. All that hypervigilance was about to pay off. He had the bullets. He had the will to fight. He’d killed men in the zone before. What he didn’t have was time. The passenger window above him was beginning to resonate dully under every fist. The hands pummeling it were legion now, silhouetted against the sky. The window was a collective drum, a thin glass membrane between him and a billion yellow spores already dusting the glass.
He willed his eyes to look away. The last fibers of the belt gave with one final jerk that sent the knife clattering against the dash. Cole pulled the shoulder belt through, only to find the cut end too mangled and frayed to pass through the tight channel of the buckle, and the muscles in his bicep and shoulder screamed until it came through suddenly and caused him to clock himself hard in the mouth with his own clenched fist.
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The pounding at the windows only intensified when the coughers saw him scrambling over the driver’s seat, crawling hands and knees across the windows broken against the pavement where the Jeep had come to rest on its side. Safety glass shards stuck in his palms, gouged his knees. He pushed past the bench seat toward the kaleidoscope of shifting zombie faces and hands pounding the rear window.
The bag was there. Cole’s fingers were bloodied, blue-black kernels of tinted glass imbedded in his palms. He wiped them against himself, thoughtless of the pain as they sliced free from his skin. He ran the zipper open and saw first the HEPA respirator he had seldom been without since he escaped the first quarantine zone with nothing but his own hide, and even some of that missing. He had modified the elastic straps to slide quickly over his head and hold the mask firmly over his nose and mouth. His hands were moving more deftly now, and he did not allow himself to look at the coughers pressing their open mouths against the back window, their anguished faces less than two feet from his.
He had just closed his hand around the grip of his AR when, behind him, he heard the passenger window shatter, a shower of broken glass through the interior and the cougher’s cries of excitement outside the Jeep louder now, anticipation spreading through the horde as though by pheromone release.
Cole turned in time to see the head and shoulders of a Cord zombie diving headfirst through the broken window.
The AR was still unloaded. Cole needed five more seconds than the coughers were willing to give him. He had something a little quicker for them, though, drawing a Glock 19 from his waistband holster and bringing the sights up just as the cougher landed on his head and struggled to right himself, arms and legs thrashing.
Cole fired in the position of a tunnel rat, lying on his side with the heel of the gun braced against the rear seat’s headrest. The flash from the nine-millimeter’s muzzle seared the air and the report of the pistol in that confined space seemed to plunge Cole’s ears underwater. The dashboard and deflating airbags were painted with the cougher’s blood and pizza dough gobs of his brain matter, a lifeless hull draping the console. Another face roared at the opening and Cole swung the pistol, squeezing off a round, the headshot good and quick enough that the body fell outside the Jeep.
Cole reached back for the mechanic’s bag and dragged it closer, covering the window all the while with the Glock. He knew from experience how quickly their bodies could pile up and he didn’t want his best escape route from the Jeep blocked by corpses.
Two more faces at the window. Three more shots, one of them wild into the door frame. Cole tried to hold the Glock steady and groped blindly in the bag until he felt his “funstick,” a 33-round double-column magazine for the Glock, and laid it nearby, ready. He knew the other windows couldn’t last and he needed that AR locked and loaded. He could see multiple sets of fingers gripping the edges of the window frame now, pulling themselves up, and he could feel the Jeep rocking from the press of the mob outside.
Hundreds of them.
Cole let the next two coughers get their heads and shoulders further into the opening before he opened fire, seven shots in quick succession. The coughers hung limp and twitching, their hands opening and closing beneath them. For a precious few seconds, their bodies served to plug the opening while the next wave of coughers clawed at their backs.
He knew it might be his only chance. He laid the Glock in the broken glass beside him and pulled three thirty-round AR mags from their Velcro pouches inside the bag. The AR was a pistol with a ten-inch barrel and a Sig Brace. Nothing ever felt better in his hands. Cole yanked back the charging handle, locked it, slapped in a mag, dropped the bolt, and flipped off the safety.
Hot.
Four
COLE’S BREATH was hot and Vader-like inside the HEPA respirator. The bodies jammed in the passenger window were slipping, the weight of their torsos drawing their legs slowly and inevitably into the opening. He had perhaps ten seconds to come up with a strategy. He wanted to close his eyes and think, but he couldn’t. The hand-beaten glass of the rear hatch had changed its pitch. Cole could hear it, even deafened by the concussion of the nine-millimeter. He saw it now, through the glass: one of the coughers brandishing a length of pipe, one instant swinging away from the window and the next bursting through it in a spray of safety glass shards that peppered Cole’s face. A fist-sized opening instantly filled with fingers and coughing mouths eager to impart their disease into the void.
Cole let them have it, the short-barreled AR spitting basketball-sized fireballs again and again. The rear hatch disintegrated and coughers jerked and seized as the rounds tore holes in their clothes and exploded their flesh upon exiting.
Thirty rounds went sickeningly fast. Cole ejected the empty mag and inserted another, smacking it into the mag well with the heel of his hand and returning the Sig Brace to his shoulder reflexively as he dropped the bolt. Cord zombies were already thick in the opening, already clawing at his feet before he shot them, and the crowd he glimpsed beyond them hardly seemed diminished. He loaded a third magazine, kicking away a cougher that took hold of his ankle before he could drop the bolt.
Bodies were accumulating like a pile of sandbags in the rear window, but they also constricted what little space he had to maneuver. Behind him, at the front of the Jeep, the windshield had begun to resonate weakly, like a rind of splintering ice. The bodies stuck in the upper window were visibly shaking as the coughers above them pounded furiously on their backs.
Cole reached for the Glock with his left hand, still firing the AR steadily with his right. The Glock felt light, but the stick mag was ready. He had more AR mags in the mechanic’s bag. What he desperately needed was another set of hands.
The two hanging bodies crumpled into a pile atop the first dead cougher and the face of a woman with tangled red hair appeared in the window immediately, never taking her dark eyes off Cole even as she fought to shove the tangled legs of the dead coughers aside to gain entry, and it unnerved Cole enough that he wasted four rounds on her, her open hand coming to a stop only inches from him, while behind him, he had forgotten to fire the AR and a cougher had already crawled through the rear window, the first blow knocking the AR from Cole’s hand and the second coming down on the crown of his head, dizzying him, black spots exploding in his vision with each successive blow. All he could see were arms flailing in the dim light above him, like the fluttering of some predatory bird. Fingernails raked his face, breaking the respirator’s seal and nearly tearing it from his mouth. Cole was not conscious of the decision to thrust the muzzle of the Glock into the cougher’s gut, nor could he hear it fire, three rounds before the slide hit something in the space between his body and the cougher and failed to cycle.
The cougher fell back, paralyzed, a nine-millimeter round blown through its spinal cord. Another cougher had already entered the front window, fighting through a forest of mangled limbs to reach him. Cole was groping among glass shards and spent shell casings for the Glock’s stick mag when the front windshield folded inward like a sheet of melting plastic, five or six coughers pushing it and thrusting themselves over it, jamming themselves into the cabin all at once, more than ten new hands clawing for Cole in the little space remaining.
Cole’s lower body was pinned by the dead cougher but he managed to twist enough to grab the stick mag, yanking it away from another hand that had grabbed at it. He ejected the Glock’s magazine and cycled the action rapidly, three times to clear the jam, and then he slammed the stick mag home, beat away another hand gripping his forearm, and racked the slide again.
He fired point blank into the faces of coughers pushing for him through the tangle. Foam stuffing exploded from the front seats and brass shell casings ricocheted off every surface and gore spattered on Cole until the Jeep’s ceiling and seats began to resemble the interior of an uncleaned microwave.
Cole twisted back to face rearward and found that the bod
y fallen across his legs would not budge, but getting his hands under the corpse’s ribcage, he managed to lift it enough to draw one leg out, while, through the remaining gap of the rear window, multiple arms strained for him and fingernails raked the top of his head. Cole beat them away, hyperventilating in the respirator, and a scream rose in his throat when his arm was seized from behind and he felt fingernails digging into his flesh.
He lost the Glock. He jerked his arm free and kicked viciously at the corpse pinning him with his free leg, almost pulling his boot out when a strange force drew it back, an unseen hand clamped around his ankle.
He heard himself screaming. He was no longer aware of any decision he made. By degrees it seemed his consciousness would separate from his body until he was able to calmly witness his own death. A medusa of new arms clawed at his back, tearing at his shirt. He kicked against the dead cougher again but the press of the mob through the busted rear window kept bearing upon it like the walls of a trash compactor, slowly compressing.
Cole kicked it again and yanked his boot free at last with a banshee cry and planted both feet squarely in the dead cougher’s chest, fighting to preserve what little room he had left, not succeeding in moving the body, but only pressing himself back until his neck was bent against the overturned ceiling. Under his bootsoles, the dead cougher’s body seemed to pulse and every pulse constricted the space that much more, forcing Cole to concede inch by inch. He found the Glock and emptied it toward the front of the Jeep, shredding several arms, but it was like targeting the waving tentacles of an octopus.