by Duncan, Ian
Cole considered putting a boot square in the cougher’s face, but thought better of it, fearing that dislodging the man might actually send the entire window with him, leaving an even larger hole. For the moment, at least, it seemed that the man was stuck fast, having broken through not the main passenger side window but the triangular fore-window that served only to let the driver see his mirrors clearly.
Instead, Cole leaned across the console and popped open the glove box, avoiding the cougher’s hand, closing and unclosing midair like an unthinking claw. He pawed through a stack of fast food napkins, fuel receipts, and a Peterbilt owner’s manual before he uncovered the very thing he’d dared hope a truck driver might stow there: a pistol. This one was a blued 1911 with stag horn grips, the edges bright with holster wear. It couldn’t have been more beautiful to Cole.
“God bless America,” Cole said, grabbing it. He checked the chamber and ejected the magazine, seeing a row of big brass-jacketed hardballs before he replaced it and slapped it home with the heel of his hand. No spare magazines in the compartment.
Seven rounds.
“What are you doing?” Emily said.
Cole settled back behind the wheel and tucked the pistol under his leg. “Trying to keep our asses alive for another ten minutes.”
He turned over the Peterbilt’s engine, which fired immediately despite having stalled out. Another cougher had taken up a position at the window on Cole’s side. Already more than seven of them were attacking the truck, and doubtless more were coming.
“Are we jammed up?”
“I’m about to find out.” Cole worked the stick into the position labeled r, but there were two of them, one black and one white, and he was really only guessing as to which was correct. He tried to ignore the coughers pounding on the window and the head of the cougher stuck in the cab with them making a low gurgling noise in its own saliva. He tried to ignore all of it long enough to simultaneously work the clutch and the gas pedal to ease the truck rearward. Instead, it stalled out, shuddering and dying. Cole cranked the engine again, this time trying the other reverse gear. Again, the truck only shook and died.
“Shit!”
“What are you doing wrong?”
“I don’t know, okay? I can’t see shit back there. I have no idea what’s happening!”
Cole wrapped his fingers around the grip of the 1911. “I’ll have to disconnect the trailer.”
Emily looked at him, wide-eyed. “You know how to do that?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“You’ll figure it out?”
Cole twisted in his seat and began searching for anything else even remotely like a weapon. Behind the captain’s chairs, in the eighteen inches or so that remained of the cab, he flung aside a duffle bag—too light to contain anything but clothes—a rain jacket and heavier winter coat with a plaid liner, several ball caps, a pair of waterproof galoshes, and underneath it all, lying so close in the corner of the floorboard that Cole nearly took it for some pipe or fixture of the truck, was a steel tire iron perhaps thirty inches long with a flat prying head on one end of the type used to work stiff-walled tires onto wheel rims.
The moment he took it in his hand, Cole knew he was back in business. He hauled it into the front seat with him and looked at Emily, who now sat almost entirely on the console to get away from the imbedded cougher’s head and arm, still writhing in anguish or anger or some indeterminable state of hapless rage, like a pinned insect.
“I’ll be right back,” Cole said, tucking the 1911 in his waistband and brandishing the tire iron.
Emily stared at him, her eyes wide above her respirator. “You’re going out there?”
Cole surveyed the half-dozen coughers festooning the windows of the truck and replied as calmly as possible, “Yep.”
“Are you mad?”
“Look, I may suck at driving a tractor trailer, but killing zombies is something I’m actually pretty good at.”
Emily’s blue eyes were imploring. “Please be careful.”
Cole held her gaze a moment longer. “Lock the door behind me.”
Forty-Eight
COLE HAD REACHED a point beyond exhaustion, a place in the hinterlands of adrenal empowerment, a state of mind balanced precariously between Zen and sheer madness. Combat veterans sometimes speak of a strange sense of action slowing, pain and bodily sensations diminishing or disappearing altogether, and the world narrowing down to the object at hand, to what must be done, the absolute necessity of which seems to entail a certain guarantee of invincibility.
An eerie calm came over him. In some strange way, he knew he was one with the Cord, and that was why he could kill it. He pushed his door open forcefully, sending the cougher outside his window tumbling from the rig.
He stood on the diamond-plate steps, closing the door behind him and motioning for Emily to lock it. She did. Cole swung the tire iron up in front of his face and waited. They seemed to come at him in slow motion, the wounded and run-over dragging themselves across the ground, the cougher that had been at his door the first to leap up and receive the full force of the tire iron flat across his face, hard enough to turn him once midair, his arms floating at his side in a lifeless pirouette before he dropped.
They clambered across the hood and slid down from the fenders, lunging for his feet from the parking lot. They climbed onto the uppermost cab and reached for him from the roof. If Cole’s presence inside the semi had enraged them, his exit from it drove them completely insane.
First, Cole smashed the hands that reached for him. Then he broke their arms. He stepped down from the semi and danced among them, turning the tire iron over his head like a kata he had learned once for the sword, placing his feet, bringing the tire iron around like a helicopter rotor, again and again. He killed them. He bludgeoned them. He bashed them. He found the Zen in killing; it was impossible to think of them as husbands and wives, employers and employees, lovers, friends—humans. They were the infected, and Cordyceps had rendered them terrorists and predators, mere combatants in a fight to the death.
The last cougher Cole brought the tire iron down on wore a purple and black FedEx uniform. For a moment Cole stared at the man where he lay, his boots kicking absently, twitching reflexively as he died.
Cole turned in a slow circle with the tire iron, holding it at the ready like a heavy katana, hardly daring to believe he had killed them all. Of course, more would come. That he had just waded into a group of coughers, alone, with nothing more than a steel rod and a pistol with seven rounds in it would later strike him as suicidal. Perhaps five more coughers, charging from the wrong angle, and he would have been overwhelmed. He knew this. He would later reassure himself that he had known it all along and that he had made the judgment, somewhat subconsciously, that it was a small enough number to handle. In truth, he had acted recklessly, and perhaps it was that realization, dawning on him now, that nearly caused him to forget the very reason why he had left the cab.
The trailer.
Cole circled the rig, taking a few seconds to grab the heel of the cougher stuck in Emily’s side window, yanking him down to the pavement with the skin of the shattered safety glass window still stuck to his neck and shoulder. Cole made short work of him with the tire iron. He did not look up to see if Emily was watching. Part of him hoped she was; part of him hoped she wasn’t.
Turning from the cougher, he began to find angular pieces of cinder block scattered across the pavement, and then he saw the right rear wheels of the trailer imbedded in the corner, lifted off the ground where they had torn into the building. Cole had little doubt that a professional driver might have had the skill to turn the tractor just the right way to back the trailer out of the jam, but he knew instinctively that it was a waste of precious time and energy for him to attempt it. The trailer had to go. They would have zero chance maneuvering the labyrinthine parking lots surrounding the shopping mal
l—much less the traffic jams and post-apocalyptic chaos of the city—unless the trailer was detached.
Cole scanned the parking lot before he bent to look across the rear tires of the semi, at the greasy jaws of the massive hitch that held the trailer. There was a huge, rusted kickstand or landing gear to lower, if one was of a mind to do things by the book, which Cole at that moment certainly was not. More problematic were the blue, green, red, and black hoses that trailed from the cab to the trailer, the lines for the air brakes and the trailer lights, Cole guessed. He could let them rip loose if he had to, though he worried that a break in the lines might interfere with the function of the semi tractor itself.
Cole looked around the parking lot again. Several of the bodies were still moving, still moaning softly. No sign of anyone or anything moving in the distance. He briefly wondered why Brandon and Chloe hadn’t come back. A number of disturbing possibilities came to mind.
Cole crouched beside the dirty tires of the semi and reached underneath the trailer, groping the hitch, his fingers coming away smeared with bright red grease, like tacky blood. He wondered if there might be a button or electric control of some kind in the cab that released the hitch. Unsatisfied, he continued to search and found a steel loop, so covered with road grime it had been nearly indistinguishable from any other component of the undercarriage. It seemed to be an imbedded key of some kind. Cole wrapped his fingers through the loop and tried to turn it. Counterclockwise and then counterclockwise. Nothing. The key didn’t budge. He tried to visualize what the key might do. The shaft of it disappeared into a glob of dark grease in the center of the hitch, precisely where he imagined some connecting ball joint from the trailer fitting into it—at least, that’s the way the die cast flatbed truck he’d played with as a child had worked.
Cole looked over his shoulder again. Still nothing in sight.
He looked back at the greasy hitch. What if the key were not a key at all, but a pin, he wondered? At nearly the same instant that the thought occurred to him, he drew his shoulder back and felt the pin come with him. As though to confirm, he saw a dark line of grease on the shaft of the pin he had just exposed. Could that be it? Was that all you had to do?
Cole had just turned his attention to the hose couplings, reaching up for a chromed handle that would help him climb up onto the rig between the cab and trailer, when he heard Emily’s voice.
“COLE!”
The voice was too clear. She was out of the cab. Cole turned and looked down the side of the truck. Emily stood above him in the open driver’s side door, her face pale and her respirator hanging around her neck.
“Get your mask— ” Cole began.
“Look!” Emily pointed across the parking lot behind him.
Cole turned on his heel.
They were coming. All of them.
Forty-Nine
COLE SCRAMBLED up the diamond plate steps behind Emily, shoving the tire iron into the floorboard, slamming the cab door behind him, and pressing the door lock button repeatedly as the wave of coughers broke around the truck. It may have only been his imagination, but Cole would have sworn he felt the press of them moving the rig. This was no bedraggled group of stragglers; this was the full riot.
Cole turned the ignition without waiting for the glow plugs, fighting the gear shift into third. Coughers were already at every window. Emily was screaming and kicking at the head of a cougher that tried to crawl through the missing triangular window.
They were moving forward, free of the trailer. Cole never even felt the brake lines and electrical cables tear loose between the cab and the trailer. By now they were enveloped completely by a horde that resisted the truck as if it was plowing through deep water. The rig swayed strangely as though in an earthquake and the steering wheel felt loose and wobbled under Cole’s grip as though something less than terra firma—something live—was beneath the tires.
Cole continued to accelerate and the semi seemed to gain speed erratically, the engine RPMs spiking for no apparent reason, and Cole could only guess that those were the moments the big dually tires were slinging bodies or spinning in the gore of some crushed corpus.
A minute later they reached what seemed to be the edge of the horde. Seeing an open expanse of parking lot ahead, Cole grabbed the next gear, accelerated, and risked performing several tight S-curves past steel light posts, hoping to shake off the coughers clinging to the outside of the cab. They tumbled easily enough from the hood. The last to go was a half-naked cougher with her arms wrapped around the stainless steel air filter housing, so immovable at first Cole thought he might have to waste a bullet to dislodge her.
It seemed, at last, that they had escaped. Cole could see the horde behind them in the side view mirror, a low dark storm, a roiling mass of humanity still on its feet, still coming after them, not at all deterred by the hundred or so of their number that Cole had flattened.
But they had not escaped entirely unscathed. Emily turned her face to the window, clutching her belly and crying.
A sick feeling came over Cole. “Talk to me, Em,” he said, bouncing in the air-ride seat as he down-shifted, piloting the truck through a maze of curbs and then turning onto a four-lane highway lined with crepe myrtles. So far he’d seen no sign of Chloe and Brandon.
“Come on, stay with me, girl,” Cole said, his own voice on the verge of uncertainty. “I need your eyes to help look for the white van.”
Emily murmured something in a broken voice. Something Cole couldn’t make out over the roar of the engine. Cole took his eyes off the road only long enough to look her over and make sure she wasn’t bleeding.
“I don’t want to bring a baby into this world,” she said, more clearly this time.
“Sure you do,” Cole tried. His voice was calm, but if Emily had seen his eyes at that moment, the flashing whites of them would have betrayed a kind of wild desperation. “This is the same old world it’s always been.”
Emily almost laughed, choked, and coughed into her fist.
“I mean, think about it,” Cole said. “This is really no different than the Bubonic Plague or Rwanda, or Influenza or the Bolshevik Revolution, for that matter.” He had begun to ramble, turning the wheel to avoid gruesome wrecks, stalled cars, and bodies littering the asphalt, glancing over at Emily every chance he got. “Bullshit like this has been going on the whole history of the world, yet here we are, right?”
Cole had no idea where any of this was coming from. He had no idea where he was going. Whether Chloe and Brandon were still alive. Whether anything even mattered at this point. If heroics were even still possible.
Emily coughed and shook her head. “You really know how to melt a girl’s heart.”
“I’m just saying,” Cole said earnestly, “what you’re doing there—he pointed to her belly—that’s how we win. People like you are the reason we’re still on this damn rock. You’re the hero of this thing, Em. I mean it.”
“You’re too sweet.”
“I’m proud of you. And I’m not giving up—and you’re not either, you hear me?”
“I’m not giving up. But there is something you should know.”
“What’s that?” Cole said.
Emily turned her head to look at him. “My water just broke.”
Fifty
COLE’S FACE TURNED ASHEN. He let out a long breath, slow and controlled, as though he were already practicing some sort of Lamaze technique behind the wheel of the truck. A funeral director could not have driven more soberly.
Emily started laughing. “You kill me, Cole.”
He stared at her, his mouth open.
Emily wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “You’re more scared of my bloody vagina than that whole pack of Cord zombies back there.”
Cole raised his eyebrows as though to question the point. “Like any reasonable man, I’d say.”
“Look,”
Emily said in a reassuring tone, “it doesn’t mean I’m going to have the baby right here in the glove compartment, but I will most likely start having some contractions.”
“Right, and then…” Cole trailed off, nodding his head as though it went without saying what came next.
Emily grinned and stared at him while he worked to shift gears. “And then?” she baited.
“Well,” Cole started, reaching up to rub his nose and tug at his shirt, “then, you know, I’ll uh, I mean, you’ll get in position or whatever, and then I’ll just coach you through it.”
“You’ll coach me through it,” Emily repeated.
“Yeah, nothing to it,” Cole bluffed, making a show of turning his head to scan the horizon as far as he could see.
Emily laid her head back against the seat and watched him quietly, and if Cole had returned her gaze long enough he would have seen the light in her eyes segue from mirth to admiration, possibly even something more, before tears came into them again, making no pretense this time to wipe them away.
“You really are in this with me, aren’t you?” she said.
Cole reached across the console for her hand and burned a look into her as long as he could take his eyes off the road. “I tried to tell you,” was all he could think to say.
Emily sat bolt upright, tearing her hand away from Cole’s.
“Over there!” she pointed.
Cole looked, scanning the parking lot beyond the row of crepe myrtles, seeing a free-standing restaurant and a collection of random cars before he saw her. Chloe stood on the roof of the white van, motionless as the statue of some heroine from a war of which men were ashamed to speak, a war of the greatest conceivable desperation, survived only by women wielding butcher’s knives.
“Shit!” Cole exclaimed, losing sight of her in the flashing trees. He downshifted and braked all at once, turning the wheel hand over hand at the next side street, then doubling back and accelerating, grabbing several gears to get back up to speed before she came into view again.