by Duncan, Ian
Emily struggled to keep up, blowing heavily against the valves of the respirator. It was obvious enough that her backpack was overloaded. Cole regretted not limiting what she’d packed. She was carrying enough with the weight of the baby and the guns as it was. They wouldn’t make it far. Cole knew he needed to do some quick thinking and get them off the street and out of sight.
They came to the end of the long corridor of fences, where the alley joined a broad residential street, the homes on the far side even larger and newer than the ones they’d passed so far. The trees planted in front of these houses were only saplings, too small to attract climbers. Cole paused at the corner and looked back for Emily. She had stopped fifty feet behind him, bent over, her hands braced against her knees and the AR pistol hanging awkwardly in her grasp like an unwanted accessory.
It was then that Cole heard or thought he might have heard something. He turned, leaning slowly past the fence until the road in the distance came into view. What he saw there surprised and confused him.
A man in a biohazard suit was coming, pedaling a bicycle at a rate that suggested a motive more urgent than mere conveyance. An instant later, there appeared in his wake a zombie horde of a magnitude Cole had only seen lately in his nightmares. It was a running mob, as wide as the street and seemingly endless, parting only to bypass cars parked along the street, and swallowing them from sight as soon as the horde merged in a solid mass on the other side of them. Cole stared in genuine shock for a moment. Even in the Florida outbreak, he’d only seen a group of coughers that big from the relative safety of a passing vehicle. Never on foot.
The horde was approaching rapidly. They had seconds, not minutes. Cole was about to dart back into the alley when another strange sight caught his eye. A dark object was flying behind the man on the bicycle, at the same speed, as surely as if he were pulling it along after him like a kite.
The drone.
Cole spun and ran back up the alley for Emily.
She straightened when she heard his footsteps, a stunned look in her eyes as though she thought he had spontaneously become a cougher. She started to bring the AR pistol up.
“They’re coming!” Cole yelled. He grabbed her arm and pulled her into the nearest driveway toward a gate in the privacy fence that enclosed the corner yard. They burst through the gate and Cole shut it behind them before he ran in a crouch for the home’s rear patio, where a set of French doors led into the house. He could already hear the tramping of a thousand feet just on the other side of the fence. Had he stopped to look, he would have seen the drone high over their heads, motionless as a tiny black cloud.
He tried the brass doorknob but of course it was locked. Emily stood beside him brandishing the AR pistol, tense as a tennis player in the ready position, watching shadows pass by the gaps in the fence. They heard what might have been one hundred sets of lungs trying desperately to empty themselves: raucous, thick coughing, a parade of the deathly ill.
Cole looked about frantically for any possible hiding place for a key. He flipped over the doormat. Nothing. He scanned the nearby flowerbeds for anything resembling a key-hider: a fake-looking stone or gnome or decorative animal. No luck. He crossed the patio to a collection of clay flowerpots. Nothing but dry and withered weeds from the previous season. He picked up the pots one by one and looked beneath them: nothing but damp rings and pill bugs recoiling from the light.
Cole looked at Emily and motioned toward the door. “I’ll have to shoot it,” he whispered.
“They’ll hear!” Emily hissed through the respirator.
“No choice.” Cole shouldered the AR and aimed for the bottom corner. He clicked off the safety, a far louder click than he’d hoped, but in another instant they’d all know anyway. He hesitated. They’d get into the house and then what? Coughers would come pouring through the busted door. He needed more time.
Just then Emily stepped to the door and reached for a hanging wall thermometer. She lifted it off, only a screw in an eyelet, and held it in her hands. Something loose rattled inside the plastic housing when she turned it over.
She looked up at Cole.
He stepped to her and turned it over once in his hands before he slid the face off and pried out a silver house key from the hollow interior.
Cole inserted it in the deadbolt. It fit. He turned the tumbler and pressed the door open slowly, cringing until he was sure there was no alarm. Another tile kitchen floor. Dark inside. He motioned Emily in ahead of him, and scanned the fence line. He stepped over the threshold and was about to shut the door gingerly behind him when he heard the heavy rumble of a diesel engine beyond the fence, perhaps only a half-block away.
Shit.
He closed the door and turned the deadbolt. Emily was standing in the middle of the kitchen, oak cabinets and granite countertops, seeming unsure how to conduct herself as a looter. Open doorways led away to the house, and on the far side of the eat-in area was a solid-panel door Cole guessed led to the garage.
“What if someone’s here?” Emily whispered.
“Let’s hope not,” Cole said, already moving toward the garage. “Look for car keys. We don’t have much time.”
He left Emily to search the kitchen and went to the door. No hooks on the wall beside it, no keys. The door was unlocked. He opened it. In the dim light of the two-bay garage he saw a tiny smart car and a motorcycle, nearly as large. A Honda Goldwing and a Toyota Prius. The only light came from the narrow garage door windows. Cole stared at the two incongruous vehicles. Neither was exactly what he’d hoped for.
Movement outside the garage drew his eye. Cord zombies milled about on the driveway, coughing and staring vacantly, seemingly waiting for some stimuli. No sign of the man in the biohazard suit.
A scream came from inside the house behind him.
Cole spun in the doorway and ran back to the kitchen. No one there. He hesitated only a moment before he charged into the hall, the AR barrel up, leading him. The hall was long and narrow and doors were shut on either side. At the end, a door stood open, though the light beyond it was faint and seemed to flicker, like a fire. Cole ran the hall, past closed doors, aware that those doors could open at any moment or the wall could dissolve in a blast of buckshot from within.
He shouldered through the open door, swung his AR into the room, and saw Emily over the sights of the rifle. She stood before a large, unmade bed where lay prostrate a man and a woman, naked and only partially covered by the bedclothes.
Cole froze, then blew out the breath he’d been holding and lowered the rifle. He took a step closer. Their eyes were dull and hardly reflected the single flame guttering in a puddle of wax on the bedside table, where stood an empty liquor bottle and an assortment of prescription pill bottles, their white lids lying carelessly discarded. The room still smelled faintly of alcohol.
Emily’s shoulders were shaking and her breaths through the mask verged on hyperventilation. Cole turned her around and saw that her eyes were squeezed tight. Her voice inside the mask was broken and hardly comprehensible. “I don’t want to see this anymore.”
“Come on.” Cole guided her toward the door. “We’ve got to find those keys.”
She returned to the hall, still crying, and Cole glanced again at the bodies. It was hard to look at anything else in the room without being distracted by them, as though they might yet stir unexpectedly or speak to him.
On turning from them, Cole noticed a pair of pants draped over the arm of an upholstered chair, a belt still run through its loops. Cole crossed the room. An unbuttoned oxford shirt lay beside the pants, and penny loafers stood on the floor by the chair, black silk socks tucked into them and their heels mated neatly together, as though not even the prospect of imminent death could deter a man from feeling as though God or some surrogate for him might yet judge a man’s life by some last act of petty slothfulness.
Cole picked up the pan
ts and shook them. A promising jingle from the pockets. He searched them and came out with a black key fob bearing the Toyota symbol. He dropped the pants and went to find Emily.
He found her in the kitchen, standing in the light of the open fridge, her respirator pulled down and a bottle of chardonnay tipped up to her lips. She took a long gulp and lowered the bottle. She swallowed and looked at Cole. “A little bit won’t hurt the baby.”
“I didn’t say a word,” Cole said. He held up the keys. “Let’s go.”
Emily set the bottle on the countertop.
At precisely that moment, Cole turned his head as though by some extrasensory cue, looking through the back window in time to see the armored vehicle explode through the privacy fence, posts uprooted and panels flattened under its massive tires. The diesel roared and the vehicle tore through the yard on a collision course with the house.
“Go!” Cole shouted.
They reached the open door to the garage just as the boat-like prow of the armored vehicle crashed through the eat-in area and destroyed the kitchen. Cole looked back. Drapes billowed, two-by-fours and busted trim flipped through the room. The chardonnay bottle shattered against the tile, hemorrhaging its contents onto the floor.
“Get in the car!” Cole yelled. He waited until Emily was halfway across the garage before he smacked the glowing button for the garage door opener and raised his AR toward the gap of expanding daylight under the door.
Behind him, he heard the armored vehicle roaring, struggling to disengage from the wreckage. Once it backed away, Cole knew, coughers would come flooding in. He ran toward the Prius, firing at a pair of legs standing outside the door as it ratcheted up, and another set of legs that came running up beside it. Both coughers crumpled, clutching their knees and wailing. Emily had already thrown open Cole’s door from inside the car.
Cole ducked and rolled into the driver’s seat, scraping his backpack so hard on the doorframe it nearly knocked him out of the car, but he managed to lean over the steering wheel and haul in the AR and close the door before a group of five coughers burst into the garage and began clawing for the door handles and coughing at the windows.
Emily had already pressed the power lock button.
Cole struggled to sit upright in the confined space, his backpack rendering it nearly impossible to get free of the steering wheel. Coughers beat at the windows and Emily screamed.
“Get that mask back on!” Cole shouted, searching the dash for a power button, accidentally turning on the windshield wipers, which a cougher astride the hood promptly ripped off and used to thrash the windshield.
Emily struggled to steady her hands long enough to don the mask.
Cole found a significant-looking circular button and pushed it, no engine sound ensuing, but all the lights on the instrument panel responding. He reached for the dash-mounted gearshift, slammed it into drive, and stomped the accelerator.
The little Prius lurched silently out of the garage, throwing off the coughers and bouncing over another lying wounded on the driveway before Cole could see clearly enough through the windshield to swerve into the alley and accelerate, trash totes passing in a blur on either side and the Prius reaching nearly forty miles per hour before a cougher leapt out from behind a fence and bounced off Emily’s side of the car, his head cracking the windshield in front of her face and Emily covering her face with her hands and screaming into the respirator.
“We’re okay!” Cole said, as much out of his own surprise as for Emily’s reassurance.
She held out both hands to steady herself against the dash. “Oh my god,” she said, “Oh my god.”
“You’re okay,” Cole said. “We made it.” He came to the end of the alley, braked, and threw the wheel hard right onto a four-lane highway. No cars in sight. Cole wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought this might be the same road he had driven in the police cruiser—when had it been? A day ago? He had no idea.
He looked at Emily. She was still bracing herself against the dashboard, looking down at her belly.
“I think I’m having the baby,” she said.
Twenty-Three
“WHAT?” Cole said, even though he’d heard her clearly. It was difficult to even turn his head to see Emily, as the backpack and tactical gear still pushed him forward awkwardly against the wheel, practically steering with his chest.
“I said, I think I’m having the baby!”
Cole struggled to keep the Prius on a straight bearing. “What—are you sure?”
“I’m not entirely sure. I just felt something really weird.”
It was Cole’s turn to sound nearly hysterical. “What do you mean, weird? What’s it supposed to feel like?”
“I don’t know, okay?”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean I’ve never had a bloody baby before so I don’t know!”
Cole looked at her in open-mouthed terror, glancing at her lap as though he half-expected to see the head of an infant crowning there.
Emily seemed to relax and looked through the windshield. “I think maybe it stopped.”
Cole nearly ran up on the curb. “Stopped? It does that?”
Emily ran a hand down the curve of her belly. “It might have just been a Braxton Hicks, you know, sort of a pre-contraction.”
Cole glanced at her again, unconvinced. Emily met his eyes and Cole looked back to the road, watching an abandoned Volvo as they approached it and passed—no one inside. When he looked back at Emily her eyes were tightened into a smile hidden behind her respirator.
“You’re going to be a total wanker about this, aren’t you?”
Cole looked at her as though she’d lost her mind.
She fell back in the seat, a kind of breathless chortling coming from inside of her respirator. “You’re more scared of me having this baby than the whole damn zombie apocalypse.”
Cole blinked and held the wheel, steering around several wrecked cars in an intersection, bodies lying around them that Emily didn’t see and didn’t need to see. “You can’t do that to me, okay?” Cole said. “You can’t be like, ‘Oh my gosh I just had my baby in my pants’ and not expect me to freak out.”
Emily laughed inside her respirator, her eyes glazed with tears and exhaustion. “You know, Cole, in some ways you’re such a typical guy.” She reached across the console and squeezed the back of his neck. “Thank you.”
Cole looked at her again, as long as he could take his eyes off the road. He was starting to think those blue eyes might be his undoing.
He managed to slide his seat back and shrugged out of the backpack, finally sitting comfortably. They passed a string of retail outlets being emptied by looters at that very moment, perhaps several dozen cars and trucks stuffed to bursting with merchandise, bungee cords and ropes crisscrossing their ungainly loads: furniture, electronics, grills, framed wall art—Cole had a moment to consider the strangely resilient sort of optimism it took to horde home goods, while high above them, flying like the very flags of anarchy, were the fruiting bodies of climbers sprouted on the corners of the buildings, seemingly impaled on radio masts and wedged in the latticework of cellular towers, the fungal growths more numerous now than the arrays of antennas and transmitters mounted there originally, as though Cordyceps itself were a new technology in competition with the most innovative achievements of mankind. And perhaps it was.
Emily stared out the window as though the things she saw there were hardly real.
Cole noticed bodies—too numerous to count—crumpled in the parking lot, apparently where the looters themselves had repelled an assault of coughers.
“Three days to anarchy,” Emily said. “Have you ever heard that?”
Cole nodded. “Personally, I think its closer to three hours. With the right kind of event.”
Emily kept staring at him, as though it were a consc
ious decision she had made, to study Cole’s face instead of the chaos passing by outside. “It seems, sometimes, like you’ve done all this before.”
Cole kept his eyes on the road, where, less than a quarter mile ahead, he could see a string of looters pushing loaded shopping carts across the highway. “I have,” he admitted.
Emily started to say something but stopped short. The Prius was noticeably slowing, losing power. No sound came from the car, but an invisible force seemed to be pulling them back.
Cole held up his hands and looked at the dash. “You gotta be kidding me.”
A screen on the console was blinking a message: ev mode not available.
“What the hell is EV mode?”
Emily shrugged. “I don’t drive.”
“You don’t drive?” Cole said, incredulous.
“I’ve never done it before, that’s all,” Emily said, somewhat defensively. “It’s not as important, where I’m from.”
Cole watched the speedometer fall below twenty miles per hour. Fifteen. Ten. He pressed the accelerator to the floor. Nothing changed. “I can run faster than this,” he muttered.
Then he saw it: a red needle fallen through the middle of a bold, white e on the instrument panel. It was a hybrid vehicle, after all, and it was out of gas. Idiot. A wave of hot embarrassment and frustration passed over him. He hadn’t even thought about the Prius needing gas, or the possibility that it couldn’t run for long without it.
Cole swore under his breath. “We’re out of gas.”
“What? Can we get more?”
“I don’t know,” Cole said. “Probably not fast enough to do us any good.”
The Prius crept along the right lane, well below fifteen miles-per-hour.
“We’re in some kind of damn environmental bullshit energy saver mode or something,” Cole said.
They were about to pass the looters with the shopping carts, but at a painfully slow pace. All four of them had turned their heads to watch the Prius approach. One of them was wearing a Santa Claus hat.