by Duncan, Ian
“Shit,” Cole said. “Have you still got that AR pistol?”
Emily reached into the floorboard for it and handed it to him.
Cole held it flat across his lap as they passed the looters. “Don’t look at them,” he said.
Cole could see them bending to look in the Prius as they passed. All but one had made an attempt to cover their faces with bandanas and dust masks, and the one with the Santa Claus hat grinned toothily as they passed. “Hey baby!” he yelled.
Emily visibly stiffened.
Cole watched them in the side-view mirror. Several had started trotting after them. Something in their hands. Pistols.
“Here,” he told Emily, “Keep my rifle barrel against the accelerator and just hold the wheel steady.”
“I told you I can’t drive!”
“Well, today’s gonna be the day you learn.” Cole was already rolling down the window. Without the backpack, he was able to turn to face the rear. He knelt in the seat, his head and shoulders leaning out the window.
He felt the Prius swerving side to side and grabbed the headrest to keep from falling from the window. “Hold it steady!’
“I’m trying!”
They were driving so slowly the looters were actually gaining on them. Cole still hadn’t shown them the gun. What could they possibly want from them? The car? Cole supposed it was better than pushing a shopping cart, even if its top speed was ten miles per hour. A darker thought occurred to him: Emily.
The Prius began meandering again, side to side.
“You’re moving the wheel with your bum!” Emily shouted behind him.
“Sorry!”
When Cole looked back, their pursuers had closed the gap to less than fifty feet, and two of them were pointing pistols at him. Both of them began firing before Cole could react. He felt the rounds impacting the little car, another bullet passing close by his head in a loud snap.
“Oh, hell, no,” Cole said. He drew the AR pistol out, flicked off the safety, and braced it against the side of the Prius. He saw flashes from the muzzles of the looters’ guns even as he put his own gunsights on them and opened up.
Five shots in quick succession and the looter in the Santa Claus hat went down, hard, like someone falling on a treadmill. The second runner had stopped when Cole opened fire, and stood bracing his pistol with both hands, firing rapidly. Cole swung the AR pistol on him and fired eight rounds off-handedly before the man dropped his gun, staggered sideways, and fell to his knees, seemingly frozen in an attitude of penance as the Prius gained distance, and the other looters scrambled to salvage the weapons of the fallen.
Emily was shouting from inside the car. “It’s doing something queer!”
Cole safetied the AR pistol and retracted himself into the driver’s seat of the Prius like the neck of a turtle drawing into its shell. The first thing he noticed, when he slid back into the seat, was a bullet hole high in the windshield and the rear-view mirror hanging by a wire, shattered.
Emily let the barrel of Cole’s AR off the accelerator and relinquished her grasp on the steering wheel. She slumped back into her seat. Her face was pale and an alarm tone sounded from the dash.
Cole laid the AR pistol on the dash, took the wheel, and looked at her. “Congratulations,” he said. “You can drive.”
Twenty-Four
THE PRIUS flashed and beeped and warbled, and then the dashboard LCD screen went blank and the instrument needles fell and the car drifted silently to a stop.
The instant that sickening and utter stillness registered in Cole’s body he realized what a comfort even their slow momentum, up until that moment, had been. Emily began to cry, her gasps echoing strangely inside her respirator.
Cole opened the door and got out, bringing the AR with him, and when he looked back and saw the surviving looters standing in the road a thousand feet back, watching, he propped the butt of the AR on his hip and let them see the universally-recognized profile of the assault rifle.
“I can do this all day, boys,” he said under his breath.
They made no move to come closer.
He bent to look into the Prius. “We gotta move.”
Emily nodded and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and opened her door. She got out and put her backpack on and stood holding the AR pistol limply like nothing she had ever wanted a part of. Cole got his own backpack on again and took in their surroundings.
A huge grocery store appeared to be the anchor of a long, L-shaped strip mall, and whether the looters had already been there or were in search of more durable goods, no activity was apparent at the entrance to the store other than a shopping cart wedged between the sliding glass doors, holding them apart. Many of the other storefronts had smashed windows and doors in evidence, much of their ransacked contents lying strewn on the sidewalk and in the parking lot as though a cyclone had sucked them out and spun them in the air before depositing them.
Emily shut her door but Cole left his standing open. He hated this out-in-the-open feeling. He walked with his head on a swivel, carrying his rifle lengthwise like a soldier on patrol. Emily followed, and Cole saw her looking over her shoulder at the car as though reluctant to leave it behind. Plenty of survivors had died in their cars in the other outbreaks, Cole knew, because they couldn’t bear the terrible vulnerability they felt without it, after two steps across the hard and unyielding macadam, the sound of coughing in the distance, and not even a glass window between oneself and that hell peopled by the dead, fruiting bodies towering from every height, and their spores adrift, invisibly, on the wind.
Cole struck out across the parking lot for the grocery store entrance, thinking they might find something to eat and a safe place for Emily to hide while he scouted the area for another car. He made sure Emily kept up with him, giving her a rough idea of his strategy while he continued to turn and scan the parking lot, sometimes walking backwards, always maintaining a low voice that would not carry off the nearby buildings.
They stepped around several bodies that had been gunshot, blood meandering away from them along the course of gravity, dried and darkened by then like an old magma flow. They passed a series of objects too random, themselves, to admit any coherent narrative: a shoebox closed over a crinkled tongue of white tissue paper, an overturned armchair with a commercial hair-dryer mounted to it, hundreds of pieces of trampled food packaging that gave Cole some doubt as to the fate of the grocery store, and piles of clothes that threatened, as they approached, to take on the form of a deflated or crushed human body, but remained, upon passing, merely empty clothes; some with plastic hangers still attached as though armfuls of merchandise, wildly bunched together and lifted from display racks, had just as quickly been dropped and abandoned where they fell.
Emily walked with one hand shielding her belly as though she might, by that simple measure, insulate the life she carried from those scenes of death. Cole kept his rifle barrel pointed toward the darkened storefronts, the depths of which, beyond their shattered windows, had so far been profoundly quiet. Emily’s breath, passing steadily through the valves in her respirator, was the only constant sound.
Cole approached the grocery’s sliding doors, the barrel of the AR leading him. Only darkness visible beyond the grocery cart wedged between the tinted glass doors. A current of air came from the opening there, like the breath of a cave, and the scents borne upon it were many and confused, not quite an aroma or stench, but the strange mixture, perhaps, of fruit both ripening and beyond ripe, the metallic scent of oxidized wine—or perhaps spilled blood—or what might have been no more than the stale air of an empty bank of refrigerators. Cole reached for the grocery cart’s handle and found it held fast between the doors. He pushed against the edge of the open door, short bristles of weatherstripping under his palm, and despite the sluggish resistance of the unpowered motor it yielded to him, gear upon unwilling gear. The door st
ayed open, and Cole realized the cart must have been wedged there when the electricity was still on. The cart rattled loudly when he pushed it into the airlock and when it stopped rolling he stood listening for a moment and heard nothing.
He knelt on the concrete by the entrance and propped his AR against the door and slid off his pack to find the dead officer’s flashlight. “When we go in, just stay close and cover my back. Don’t shoot unless I shoot first.”
Cole found the flashlight, only to remember that the batteries were dead. Not even the faintest admission of light when he pressed the tailcap switch. He dropped it back into the bag and noticed Emily wasn’t looking at him. He followed her gaze across the parking lot. Nothing had changed as far as he could tell. “You good?”
“I thought I saw something.”
“Where?” Cole slipped into the backpack’s straps and picked up his AR.
Emily pointed. “Along that wall there at the corner.”
Cole stared for a moment. Nothing moved. “What did it look like?”
Emily shook her head. “Nothing, I suppose. Someone’s head, maybe.”
Cole watched a moment longer. “Let’s get inside.”
They stepped into the airlock and found another pair of sliding doors, these held open by a small wire basket. The opening was narrow and Cole stood close with the AR in his hands, trying to peer through it. He heard nothing. He motioned silently to Emily with something like a Ranger hand signal to keep an eye on the parking lot. She nodded and stepped back to the first set of doors, holding the AR pistol at the ready. Either she’d seen enough action movies to know what that meant, or she was just his kind of woman. He watched her for a moment longer, partly to gauge, by her facial expression, if she saw anything in the parking lot, and partly out of a growing admiration. Her eyes scanned the lot, darting rapidly from point to point. No alarm in them.
Cole looked back through the gap in the doors. The only light in the interior came from the glass windows at the front of the store, each aisle stretching away into darkness, and the shapes at the rear of the store irresolute and scattered. The inventory had already been plundered, though how thoroughly was impossible to tell. The floors were littered with discarded packaging and pieces of trampled cardboard, paper, and plastic wrappers, but Cole noticed the shelves were not entirely bare.
He leaned his face even closer to the gap between the doorframes. He began to have the impression that the looting of the store had been interrupted; that, for whatever reason, the carcass had been abandoned before the bones were picked entirely clean. A single tin of sardines or an unopened can of black beans would have made Cole’s day at that point. His stomach had begun to feel like a clenched fist within his belly, and several times in the last hour he had felt light-headed.
He had an idea and, leaning his shoulder against the door, he pressed the opposing door with his hand, forcing them apart enough to free the wire basket. He made sure Emily made eye contact with him before he swung the basket up and pitched it, underhanded, as high as he could into the store. Before it struck the ground he had returned his hand to the AR, brought the barrel up, and stood watching for a reaction from the dark aisles.
The basket landed on one of the conveyor belts at the nearest checkout, resonating and bouncing before it clattered to the floor.
The noise seemed deafening. Cole panned his gunsights over the dark aisles, waiting for some stumbling cougher to show himself.
Nothing.
After another moment of listening, Cole decided he would rather take his chances with the interior of the grocery store than the entire outside world. He stepped back to the first set of doors and slowly forced them closed, at last only a quarter inch of daylight showing between the weather stripping on either side. There was no way to lock them, he realized, and even if there had been, the glass itself was easy enough to shatter. It would have to do.
He nodded to Emily and side-stepped through the gap between the second set of doors, bringing his AR up immediately and scanning his surroundings. Behind him, Emily fought with the doors for a moment, pushing with her shoulder against one and the heel of her hand against the other before she got the opening wide enough for her belly. Cole would have felt bad about it had his attention not been fixed on strange drag marks he saw in the nearby litter. He hadn’t seen these from the door: bloody streaks leading down the nearest aisle into the darkness beyond.
Cole tensed. That wasn’t right. Something about that drag wasn’t right.
His head snapped to Emily, standing just inside the doors now, taking in her surroundings cautiously.
“Go back,” Cole hissed.
She looked at him, eyes wide.
Cole started toward her. “Go back!”
“Hold it right there,” said a voice behind him.
Cole froze. He knew there was a gun by the sound of the man’s voice; by the phrase, even, reiterated lamely from television drama. Cole turned slowly, his hands like a vise on the AR, the barrel pointed at the ground but ready to snap up. He saw the man over his shoulder before he had even finished squaring his shoulders, his boots grinding a paper wrapper against the floor. He was in position to fire, although he didn’t like the fact that Emily was directly behind him.
The man Cole squared off against was middle-aged, his black hair standing in an unruly, slept-upon shock, a neatly-trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee, and dark eyes that peered at him over the barrel of a stainless revolver, his finger on the trigger. The khaki slacks and oxford shirt he wore were spattered with blood. A cubicle farmer caught in the apocalypse.
“Set the guns down,” he demanded.
Cole shook his head. “Can’t do that.”
“Both of you, right now!” The long barrel of the revolver wavered.
“We’re not giving up our guns, and nobody’s asking you to give up yours,” Cole said calmly. “We’ll just let ourselves out the way we came in.” Cole could hear Emily’s breaths heaving in and out through the respirator behind him, but didn’t dare turn to check on her.
Just then the man’s face seemed to sag and his mouth loosened in astonishment. “Wait a minute,” he said, holding up his hand, and then, turning his head slightly to someone out of sight: “Hey guys, check this out!”
Cole’s eyes flitted to the nearest aisle hidden from view, where, presently, another gun barrel appeared, a riot-length shotgun held by a slender woman in a black hoodie and jeans, perhaps five-feet tall, her hair pulled back in a pony-tail and the dark lines of a lifelong smoker on her face.
“Oh my god,” she said, her mouth and the shotgun barrel going slack in unison, “it’s them.”
Twenty-Five
HIDING PLACES were abandoned in the far reaches of the grocery store, and in all, six survivors came to stand before Cole and Emily, examining the pair with rapt curiosity and exchanging excited glances like commoners being visited by a king and queen. Even the man with the goatee had lowered his revolver.
Emily stood at Cole’s elbow now, looking over his shoulder. “What’s this now?” she said through the respirator.
Cole only shook his head.
The six were an odd assortment: four men and two women, an African American with a beard, a Latino in a jogging suit, a zit-faced teenager that towered over the others by at least a foot, and a brunette, probably in her mid-twenties, with tattoos visible on her wrists, neck, and chest. They were, to the last of them, filthy and blood-spattered and brandishing various kinds of weapons, though the revolver and the shotgun appeared to be the only firearms among them. The brunette held a huge meat cleaver. A fireman’s axe and a tire iron were among the others. Several of them wore paper dust masks and others had larger HEPA respirators hanging around their necks by the straps.
The man with the goatee transferred his revolver to his left hand and stepped forward, extending his hand. “Cole McGinnis!” he said amicably, “Y
ou’re an all-American badass, brother. My name’s Brandon. Honored to meet you.”
The man’s smile was genuine. Reluctantly, Cole took his hand off the AR’s action and let the man pump it enthusiastically. Cole was nearly limp with shock. He nodded toward Emily. “This is—”
“Emily,” Brandon said. “It’s a pleasure.”
“How the bloody hell can you know that?” Emily said, her voice echoing in the mask.
Behind Brandon, the woman with the shotgun held up a large smart phone and smiled. “I never miss an episode,” she said. “I’m the only one with any signal for some reason.”
“You’re watching us on a show?” Cole asked, incredulous.
“Cordyceps Nation,” the woman said. “Last episode we saw, you raided a house and jacked a Prius and barely escaped from a huge swarm of coughers.”
Now it was Cole’s turn to look astonished.
“Oh my god,” Emily said.
“They’ve been watching us the whole time,” Cole said, as much to himself as to anyone. He looked back toward the main entrance. “They know we’re here. They’re bound to.”
Several of the other survivors exchanged glances.
“We’re going to be on the show!” squealed the woman with the shotgun, as though they’d won a lottery of some kind.
The teenager grinned.
“You don’t understand,” Cole said. “They’re not coming to rescue us. All they care about is getting their footage. They’ll bring the whole damn city down on top of us.”
Some seemed surprised by that, others still wore disbelief on their faces.
Cole wasn’t done. “Those sons of bitches followed me in an armored car and just watched while the girl I was with got infected and sprouted.”
Emily looked at him now.
“Do you people hear what I’m saying? The producer of your favorite show sat outside the house we were hiding in, calling for them with air horns and fireworks, and when that didn’t work they shot the place up—shot at a woman nine-months pregnant—just to force us back on the run, just to make their goddamn show more exciting.”