by Duncan, Ian
“I SAID HELLO, GODDAMMIT!”
Cole’s hands were shaking. He turned to look for Emily and saw her facing the exit door, her head resting against the flat steel panel, shoulders convulsing.
Cole took a minute to compose himself while he watched the two men die. He dropped the Sig Sauer’s slide and tucked the empty pistol into his waistband. They were human scum, anyway—as bad as Cord zombies, really. Low men waiting all their lives, deterred only by fear of punishment, waiting for this—this, their shining moment in history, to crawl out from hiding and steal a truckload of tools and appliances. Pests. Human cockroaches.
Cole waited until their eyes were still, then turned his back on them. He approached Emily slowly, forming and reforming an attempt at an apology in his mind, and coming up with nothing. She batted away the hand he placed on her shoulder, whirling on him, her eyes red and burning.
“Why did you have to do that! Why?”
She pommeled Cole with the heels of her fists until he caught her wrists and pulled her in, getting his arms around her shoulders and restraining her for only a few seconds before he felt her give in, sinking into him before the tears came.
Cole stood holding her, there before a door that led to a city peopled by the dead, while behind him, dead men lay wicking up their own blood, and yet he could feel, in the hard round belly pressed against him, a tremulous new life, a being that as yet knew nothing of cynicism or death or a sickness so persistent that killing could become the only way to live.
“How did you know?” Emily said at last, pulling her head from Cole’s chest and wiping her eyes. “How did you know they were bad men?”
“A bad man will always tell you exactly what he’s planning to do,” Cole said. “The hard part is taking him at his word, and acting on it. I heard that somewhere. Maybe it was a movie. Hell, I don’t know. I saw the way he looked at you.”
Cole felt Emily shudder and her lips had just started to form some word, like a thought brought to the front of her mouth, when the sound of a horn blowing came from the parking lot outside the door.
They looked at each other, wide-eyed, before Cole let go of Emily’s shoulders and they separated, Cole easing the door open just enough to look out. He still hadn’t told Emily that they had no more ammunition.
“What do you see? What is it?”
Cole hardly knew how to describe what he was seeing. In the center of the parking lot, the white minivan was turning in a tight, continuous circle, nearly executing a donut and leaning on the springs, while without it, a crowd of relentless attackers were being flung away, as though slung from a centrifugal amusement park ride. In the midst of the chaos, the staccato horn came, apparently, as an SOS call.
Emily grew desperately impatient and finally shoved in beside Cole to look beyond the door at the spectacle. Cole pulled the door closed and looked at her, his face slack.
“I don’t have any more bullets,” he admitted.
“What can we do?”
Cole shook his head.
“There’s got to be something we can do!”
“I don’t know, okay? Let me think!”
“How long can they do that, before it’s too late?”
Cole held up his hand. “We need a diversion, something to distract the coughers and buy us enough time to jump in the van and leave.”
“How do we do that?”
Cole looked at the forklift, with its open sides and only a skeletal roll cage to protect the driver. He could probably mow down a few zombies with the forks, but in the long run it would be suicide. An entire retail store full of tools and materials lay behind him, of course, but no time to MacGyver some sort of weapon from the contents of the store. Cole had a brief mental image of himself charging the crowd of coughers with nothing but a nail gun or a battery-powered reciprocating saw.
Tires squealed in the parking lot. Cole pushed the door open again and Emily pressed against him in the doorframe to see.
Coughers festooned the minivan like ants on a watermelon rind. They clung to the rails of the luggage rack and even to the windshield wipers and side view mirrors. The van fishtailed and careened through the lot, the strategy of staying in motion no longer working as Cord zombies atop the vehicle reached down to pound the windows with their fists. The van raced toward the loading dock, rocking on the springs as it rolled over the bodies of several fallen coughers, swerving at the last moment, the rear end swinging around and glancing off the side of the tractor trailer backed up to the dock, the same one the thieves had planned to fill with stolen tools and appliances.
It was only then that Cole noticed, at the far end of the trailer, the dark blue cab and shining chrome exhaust piping of the semi itself. So, the thieves had a plan, after all, to haul away their loot. How they intended to traverse miles of ruined infrastructure, or where they planned to resell their goods was a question perhaps lost in the excited impulse of the crime, much as the sober reckoning of consequences so often escapes the criminal mind.
Emily seized Cole’s arm. “We have to do something!”
“I’m working on it, okay?”
Cole ran back to the two dead thieves, nearly loosing his footing and having to take a knee in the slick of their combined blood, which soaked immediately through the fabric of his pants. He rifled through the jeans pockets of the first man, finding something metallic that jingled, but when he drew it out was only a collection of gold wedding bands attached to a key ring. He let it fall to the bloody puddle and kept searching. He rolled the second man’s body onto his back, his entire chest and face soaked in blood, and Cole now wearing bright red gloves of blood. He searched the big coverall pockets, finding, this time, an actual key ring, one of which was large and black and bore, in the center of the fob, the word peterbilt. Cole patted the man’s chest pockets, too, and felt something hard and bulky. With bloody wet fingers, he unbuttoned the denim flap there and drew out a subcompact pistol—a .380, if he’d taken the time to examine its markings. Cole only drew back the slide far enough to see the shining brass shell in the chamber, then ejected the single stack magazine and quickly counted seven rounds. Nearly as an afterthought, he retrieved the first man’s crowbar from the concrete floor.
He dashed back to Emily. “I might have to leave you here.”
“Like bloody hell you’re leaving me here! I’m going with you.”
One glance at her face told Cole it was no use arguing. “Get your respirator on, then.”
Emily fumbled with the straps, cupping the mask over her nose and mouth and sliding the elastic band through her tangled hair.
Cole handed her the crowbar, which she took without question. She’d been in the zone long enough to know what it was for. “We’re going to make a run for the truck,” he explained, checking the pistol again, making sure there was no safety.
“The van?”
“No, the semi, the eighteen-wheeler. The one attached to this trailer. I think I found the key on one of the looters.”
“And then what?”
“Then we’ll play it by ear.”
“What does that mean, play it by ear?”
“It means I’ll figure it out,” Cole said, already pushing open the door and peeking out. The van was gone, and it seemed the majority of the coughers had gone with it, perhaps four or five stragglers and crumpled bodies littering the parking lot where they had been either crushed, trampled, or flung so hard from the moving van they hadn’t regained consciousness.
“We’ve got to go. Right now,” Cole said.
Emily followed without hesitation.
A short flight of concrete steps led from the loading dock down to the parking lot, where Cole ducked behind the rearmost set of dually wheels on the tractor trailer and duck-walked beneath it to the other side. They squatted on their heels by the far set of wheels, Emily holding her belly with one hand and di
gging her fingers into the tread of the huge tires for support.
Cole peered around the tire, brandishing what felt, under the circumstances, like a ridiculously undersized pistol. Coughers were scattered randomly throughout the parking lot on that side of the truck, too, and perhaps a half-mile away, he saw what looked like the white van driving on the far side of a long curb lined with decorative trees. He couldn’t tell, from that distance, whether coughers still clung to the roof, or how close Chloe and Brandon might be to losing control of the vehicle.
Cole beckoned silently for Emily to follow, and they ran in a half-crouch down the side of the trailer toward the cab. Cole had what he hoped was the key to the truck clenched in the fingers of his left hand.
The first cougher rounded the front of the truck in a flat-out sprint, physically knocking into Cole, who lost the key ring and had to wrestle the cougher to the ground before he could get control of the little pistol, the trigger short and stiff before the .380 popped loudly and the cougher fell back with a gurgling cry of rage and pain.
Cole scrambled to recover the key ring, only to see the cougher getting to his feet. Emily placed one foot and made major-league contact with the curved end of the crowbar, knocking the cougher flat, this time to lie perfectly still.
Cole ran for the cab door, key in hand. He could see the keyhole in the door, nearly at eye-level. He inserted the key. It fit. Behind him, Emily screamed.
Cole whirled and brought up the pistol. The first cougher, a shirtless man in tattered clothes, reminiscent somehow of a Marvel action figure, opened his mouth and roared like a man possessed before Cole shot him twice in the chest, sending him stumbling back, only to regain his footing and charge again into a single shot fired at his head, point-blank.
Cole turned to see Emily flailing the crowbar at the raised arms of another cougher, blocking her blows exactly before he reached out, with uncanny reflexes and grabbed the crowbar from her hands midair. He raised it over his head, let out a great snort of Cordyceps-laden breath, and was about to bring the crowbar down on the crown of Emily’s head when Cole emptied the pistol into him, center of body mass, holes exploding in his clothes and the crowbar clattering to the pavement as he dropped.
“Come on!” Cole dropped the empty pistol and leapt onto the truck’s running board, turning the key and swinging the door open, placing one hand solidly on Emily’s flank and shoving her up the diamond-plate steps into the cab before he drew out the key, bit it with his teeth, and clambered up into the big rig after her.
Forty-Seven
THEY LOCKED the cab doors just as a ragged group of six coughers, undoubtedly drawn by the gunshots, climbed onto the rig and began yanking at the door handles and pressing their mouths against the windows, blasting a yellow, Cordyceps-laden fog against the glass.
The cab was not a sleeper and ended little more than a foot behind the captain’s chairs and an expansive center console. Cole and Emily had nowhere to go, nothing they could do, for the moment, but crouch on the seats and stare at the Cord zombies on the other side of the windshield, as though it were all no more than a horror movie they were watching on a widescreen television. As far as they had run and as much as they had fought, the Cord was still only a single glass pane away from ending life as they knew it. The only question that remained, Cole feared, was simply how much further they could go, how many more crazy chances they could take, and how much longer they could hold their breath before luck finally played itself out.
Emily sank into the passenger seat and covered her face with her hands. “Please make it stop,” she said in a small, high voice.
“I’m on it,” Cole said. He slid behind the huge, upturned steering wheel emblazoned with the Peterbilt logo, inserted the key into the ignition, and turned it forward to the first position. An orange light appeared on the dash beside the glow plug symbol. Cole stared at the tiny bulb, waiting, trying to ignore the cougher slobbering yellow-tinged drool against the glass at his elbow. As soon as the light blinked off, Cole turned over the engine and the big diesel rumbled to life beneath them.
Cole’s hand hesitated at the stick shift, the face of which was covered with numbers and converging lines in multiple colors that looked more like a schematic for an oil refinery than the shift pattern for any vehicle he’d ever driven.
“Why couldn’t it be an automatic?” he muttered.
One of the coughers holding onto the side view mirror started beating his fist against Emily’s window, taking aim and throwing his shoulder into each blow, seemingly oblivious to the pain.
“Cole, we need to go, now!”
Cole put his boot against the clutch and toggled the stick. He worked it into the position the diagram seemed to indicate was first gear. There were seventeen other gears. Cole had never driven anything bigger than a U-Haul before, and that had been an automatic. He could only hope it worked on the same principal as any other manual, only on a much bigger scale. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, though, was lodged a tidbit about big rigs, perhaps from talking to a professional driver once, but the only inkling he had of it was that semi’s were certainly not just a bigger version of any other manual transmission. All this he was about to discover by process of trial and error—with zombies.
“Cole!”
“I’m working on it!” He gave it some pedal and eased up on the clutch. The RPM needle rose and the engine roared, and absolutely nothing else happened.
“Why won’t it go?” Emily said, her voice rising to the breaking point.
“There must be a brake somewhere!” Cole said, searching the lower dashboard and console for any recognizable feature.
“What’s that yellow thing?” Emily pointed. “That knob!”
“Okay,” Cole said, fingering it and examining a symbol he didn’t recognize.
“Just smack the bloody thing!” Emily said, and struck it with the heel of her hand.
A sound like an indiscriminately blown flute came from somewhere beneath them along with a rush of compressed air.
Cole tried the clutch and gas pedal combination again. Again, the RPMs rose and the engine roared and the semi still didn’t budge.
Blood clouded the glass beside Emily, the cougher’s lacerated fists continuing to pommel the window and the tenor of the struck pane unnerving Cole to the point of distraction.
“Cole, the window is breaking! It’s starting to crack!”
Cole stomped the clutch and wiggled the stick shift, this time trying to maneuver it into second gear. Again with the clutch and gas pedal. Again, nothing.
“Shit!”
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing, that’s the whole problem!”
He tried third. The truck shuddered and vibrated and started idling forward. Cole stepped on the gas pedal and this time the rig grumbled forward, shaking them in their seats.
“We’re moving!” Cole shouted. He gave it more gas. He had the satisfaction of watching two coughers lose their grip and slide helplessly across the fiberglass hood, disappearing over the grille guard and falling out of sight, their bodies not substantial enough to cause so much as a hiccup in the truck’s momentum.
When Emily screamed, Cole’s attention had been focused on steering the semi out of the parking lot, past a long row of dumpsters at the rear of an adjacent strip mall, the naked cinderblock wall of which was already looming in the windshield. He saw Emily swatting at a hand—what appeared, at first, to be a disembodied but live hand in her lap, but actually belonged to the cougher outside the cab, still clinging to the side view mirror, blood streaking the arm he had thrust through the jagged opening in the glass.
“Get it off me!” Emily shouted, swatting at the hand in a panic, as one might when attacked by stinging insects or clinging spiders.
“Get away from it!” Cole yelled, whipping the steering wheel just before the tru
ck’s bumper would have rammed the wall.
Emily backed over the seat and onto the console, kicking at the arm with her feet.
Cole piloted the truck into an alley between the buildings, his next visible obstacle a row of abandoned cars in the parking lot beyond. The truck began to shudder when he slowed for the turn, so he pressed his boot against the gas pedal, which might have worked had it not been for the fifty-three-foot trailer following along behind them, which Cole had, unfortunately, already forgotten.
A horrible screech and crash brought the rig to a sudden, lurching halt. The cougher swung forward on the side view mirror like a door on its hinge, knocked wildly but not knocked loose, and resuming, almost before the truck came to a stop, his attempt to enlarge the hole in the glass.
The truck engine died with a clatter of suffocated valves. Cole had been thrown against the dash and Emily had collided with his back, the stick shift nearly impaling him under their combined weight. In the moments it took to extricate themselves, two other coughers had climbed onto the rig and begun pounding.
“Bloody hell,” Emily said.
Cole groaned. “Are you okay?”
“What was that?”
“I think I caught the trailer on the side of the building.”
Pounding on the window drew Cole’s attention, and without thinking he locked eyes with one of the coughers on the other side of the glass. A strange moment passed, searching for something more than predatory intelligence in a face that bore the stripped image of its Maker. It was gone. The man’s eyes flared, as though excited by some territorial challenge, and he bared a perfect set of yellowed teeth.
“Cole, he’s coming in!”
Cole swiveled to Emily’s side. The cougher there had one arm and a head through the opening busted in the safety glass, the whole sheet of glass shards and blood bending and beginning to yield like the membrane of a hideous birth.