by Duncan, Ian
“Look,” Cole said, “you can barely see the video camera hanging from that one.” He was sure it was the same camera they had pointed at him for the first time in Emily’s neighborhood. He could have smiled at the irony and justice of it. Some things God would tolerate, and some things he wouldn’t. Cole shifted the truck back into gear and accelerated.
Emily cried out in pain, grabbing the console with one hand and the handle of the door with the other. Cole slowed the truck and watched, helpless, while sweat broke out on her forehead. After a long minute, she relaxed and blew out a pent-up breath.
“That was only a few minutes from the last one,” she said.
“Only a few minutes?” Cole said, incredulous, as though Emily were violating a timeline they had previously agreed upon.
“I told you it was unpredictable.”
“Can’t you just prairie-dog it for a few more minutes?”
Emily laughed painfully, holding her belly. “It’s a baby, not a turd, you moron.”
Cole grinned and accelerated again, working through the gears. He had no idea how he would pull this off, but he took the climbers in the biohazard suits for a good omen. A second later, his smile faded when he saw a yellow light wink on behind the steering wheel and he noticed the Peterbilt’s fuel gauge for the first time, the needle already touching the e at the bottom of the gauge.
Now it had to work.
Fifty-Two
“THE PLAN,” Cole explained—which he was actually figuring out as he talked—“is to roll up on them before they see us coming. This truck is actually the best weapon we have. I’m not sure we can disable the armored vehicle, but if we can ram it hard enough we might knock them senseless long enough to storm the hatch. I’m thinking Walsh might only have one man left besides himself.”
Emily listened patiently while he talked, and when he paused she said, simply, “Cole, I’m having a baby. I want to get Walsh, too, and I hate to hold you back, but I can’t do any ramming.”
Of course she was right, Cole admitted, but he couldn’t help the sinking sense of disappointment that came over him. Now that he had the perfect battering ram, he couldn’t use it. He couldn’t just drop Emily off somewhere, wish her luck, and do his best to make it back alive before her baby was born. He couldn’t do that to her. He also couldn’t bear the thought of Walsh getting away with everything he’d done. Worse than that—of profiting from it.
He’d just have to improvise on the fly. Cole cut back into the parking lot from the road, driving nearly on the sidewalks of the retail buildings that formed the nucleus of the block, squashing debris and smashing through shopping carts laden with abandoned loot, completing what he hoped would be a huge circle that would bring them out into the open near the intersection where they’d left Chloe—perhaps where Walsh was, even at that very moment, picking her up. If they came on them unexpectedly, Cole knew he’d only have a split second to decide what to do. At worst, it was an irrational and reckless plan. At best, it might just be crazy enough to work.
Cole saw a clearing ahead, where the strip of retail box stores ended and the road appeared to curve around to a row of free-standing restaurants, what must have been late additions to a once-empty parking lot.
“This looks like it,” Cole said, pressing his boot to the gas pedal.
Emily braced her feet against the floor and clutched the sides of the captain’s chair. They burst through a trio of boxwood bushes Cole could not steer quickly enough to avoid, scattering a swirl of leaf confetti behind them and flattening a signpost before the big truck tires chirped on the pavement and they rocked over the curb and Cole continued to accelerate hard along the curve of the road. Emily reached over her shoulder for the seatbelt and pulled it across her chest, clicking it into place.
“Son of a bitch,” Cole said, his teeth on edge. “It’s them.”
The armored vehicle had come into view, less than two hundred yards away, parked beside the shot-up white van where they’d found Chloe.
Cole grabbed one more gear and accelerated. One hundred yards and closing. Someone was standing atop the armored vehicle. It was Chloe. For whatever reason, she’d returned to the van after they’d abandoned her by the road. She was bending to do something to the hatch, trying to open it, or waiting for someone to open it for her from the inside.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Cole said, keeping his foot mashed on the accelerator.
“Cole, please!” Emily shouted.
“I’m just going to give it a little love tap!”
At one hundred feet, Cole could see the pale horror on Chloe’s face, yanking on the hatch lid with irrational hope. Cole stomped on the brake pedal, standing on it, and the truck skidded, the rear wheels locking with the screech of violated rubber and the rig slowing significantly just before impact.
Chloe was knocked from her feet and nearly fell over the side of the armored vehicle, barely managing to seize a steel rung welded to the deck. Cole and Emily rocked forward against their seatbelts, but not violently, the tremendous weight of the semi’s frame and engine absorbing most of the collision.
Cole ripped off his seat belt and leapt from the cab. He had the 1911 in his hand before his feet hit the ground. What men later refer to as a tiny voice in their heads was telling him that all this was happening too fast, that life was not like an action film, that only fools rush in, that wild improvisations could only carry one so far before disaster—but his hatred for Chloe and Walsh and even the hulking image of the armored vehicle, together with the roar of the 1911, bucking in his hands, deafened him to all such warnings.
The first round missed, Cole’s feet still moving as he strode aggressively toward the armored vehicle. He stopped, steadying the pistol with both hands, the second and third rounds firing in quick succession, not even feeling his finger on the trigger, only seeing the fireball concussion exploding from the end of the pistol, and beyond it, Chloe falling, carried over backwards by the heavy slugs just like he knew she would be.
So satisfying was that sight, and so focused was he on the gun in his hands, that Cole did not see the hatch opening or Walsh’s tanned face rising from it, the satanic grin spreading there, or the barrel of the pistol that rose with him.
Fifty-Three
THE FIRST TWO BULLETS knocked Cole from his feet. The third he felt tugging at his pants leg, a strangely painless sensation of pressure that hardly even burned where the bullet bored through his flesh with no more resistance than that offered by the fabric. The fall knocked the breath from him, and his vision flashed black when his head bounced off the pavement, the image of Walsh towering over him appearing even before the oxygen returned, as though it were his first glimpse of some hellish afterlife.
Cole gasped for air, the muscles in his neck and chest tightening in a drowning panic. He did not know how many times he had been shot or what damage the rounds had done. Walsh was saying something he could not hear or comprehend, pointing the pistol down at him, grinning as he watched Cole sucking air.
The air filled his lungs in a welcome, burning rush.
“You really could have had such a good career in acting,” he heard Walsh saying. His voice sounded more fluid and slurred than he remembered.
“The drama, Cole, the dialogue—it’s all been so good. You’re sure you never had any coaching?”
Walsh was drunk, Cole thought. He pressed his hands against the pavement, then remembered the 1911. He turned his head and saw it, lying close to the truck tire, where it had flown from his hand, hopelessly out of reach.
“Cole, please look at me when I’m speaking to you,” Walsh said.
Cole turned his head back slowly to gaze at the face he hated.
“See, that’s better.”
Cole heard something else now, in the silence, and realized that the truck must have stalled out, that he must have left it in gear in his excitement whe
n he slammed the brakes, because he could hear Emily in the cab, now, moaning in pain.
“Oh, don’t worry about her,” Walsh said, gesturing toward the semi with his pistol. “Women have been bearing children under adverse circumstances for thousands of years, isn’t that what you said? I’m not sure I’ll be able to use that line in tonight’s show, but I thought it was funny, at least.”
Cole managed to prop himself up on his elbows long enough to see his leg. He felt pressure on his chest as though something were sitting on him, but there was nothing there that he could see. A couple of small holes in the fabric that covered the ballistic vest. Blood was already soaking through his pant leg, filling in the coarse texture of the macadam beneath him. It all came as a shock to him—even more so the question of how Walsh had heard that conversation.
“I don’t believe you,” Cole managed.
“Well, you don’t have to,” Walsh said, jerking the pistol carelessly. “But let me ask you this. Did you really think I didn’t know that you’d take the truck? That I don’t know how you think? Your survival instincts?”
Cole just stared at the man, his mind reeling, and his hatred intensifying all the more. Behind him, in the cab of the truck, Emily’s cries had reached a pitch of desperation. This was his worst failure—not that he would die at his enemy’s hand, but that he would leave her alone in this, her most terrifying moment. Abandoned when she needed him most.
“Think about this, Cole,” Walsh went on, seemingly deaf or totally unbothered by Emily’s cries. “What do you think were the odds of your stumbling across a grocery store full of survivors, eager to help you and share their food with you, helpless and needing your help to be their hero?”
“You’re lying,” Cole muttered, stealing another glance at the pistol. At least eight feet away.
Walsh glanced behind him at Chloe’s body. “You were surprised that Chloe was on my payroll? What about all the others?”
Cole shook his head bitterly, refusing to accept a reality so twisted as the one Walsh insinuated. The evil of the Cord was nothing compared to this man.
“Oh yes, they were all hired hands,” Walsh said. “Of course, they didn’t expect to die. I did mislead them there. But that’s what makes their demise so convincing on film, the shock of it, you see. That’s why they call me the father of reality television. I decide what’s real and what’s not. I weave together the choreographed and what simply happens, the spontaneous, the unplanned. It’s really a lot like being God, I suppose.”
Walsh pursed his lips as though he were considering something profound for the first time.
“You’re nothing but a son of a bitch,” Cole managed, wincing when he tried to bend his leg. The puddle of blood was slowly expanding. If Walsh wasn’t going to kill him anytime soon, he needed to get a tourniquet above that knee.
“That may be,” Walsh admitted, coming out of his reverie. “But you have to admit, I’m a rich and famous son of a bitch.”
When Cole looked up again at Walsh, his heart and his breath nearly stopped.
Walsh still held the pistol, but in his other hand he held aloft a fully-matured Cordyceps anther, contained in a clear plastic bag. It was gruesome and terrible, like a severed head. The spores were bright and fresh, billions of them dusting the inside of the bag. Walsh held it close to his face and looked at it proudly, even admiringly.
“COLE!” Emily screamed from the truck, her voice broken and ragged.
Cole tried to scoot backwards, but searing pain shot up from his leg, and Walsh adjusted the pistol to remind Cole that the attempt had not gone unnoticed.
“Thank you, thank you,” Walsh said, his eyes shining, gazing out into the parking lot over Cole’s head as though looking into a sea of faces at an awards ceremony. “I’d like to thank the whole cast,” he continued in a tone of drunken grandeur, “for making this incredible season possible. Many of them—well, I guess all of them—gave their lives, but as they say in our business, the show must go on.”
Here Walsh flashed his artificially whitened teeth in a smile like a shark and looked down at Cole, adjusting the pistol until Cole could see the dark bead of Walsh’s right eye directly in line with the gunsights.
“I do appreciate your contribution,” Walsh said. “Good-bye, now, Cole.”
Cole could see Walsh’s finger curling tighter, millimeter by millimeter, in a protracted moment of horror. The last thought Cole had before the gunshot was that he would never forgive himself for not having a better plan, for not being able to think of a way out of this, a way to save Emily and her baby.
Cole flinched at the gunshot, incredibly loud and close at hand, but felt nothing. He looked down at his chest, incredulous, then back at Walsh, only to see that part of the man’s face was gone or melted—suddenly become surreal—and then Walsh’s body tottered forward stiffly like a tree falling and the fabric of his Hawaiian shirt exploded twice in a red mist no special effects artist could have duplicated: two more gunshots thundering in quick succession.
Cole watched, dumbfounded, as Walsh fell from the armored vehicle head-first, crumpling ingloriously against the pavement, his legs flopping backward over his bloodied head and the anther rolling away from him, blotting yellow spores against the interior of the plastic bag again and again.
Cole dragged himself quickly to the 1911 and picked it up.
“COLE!” Emily screamed.
“I’m okay!” Cole shouted. “Are you okay?” He leaned against the truck tire and brought up the pistol, aiming it at the far side of the armored vehicle, waiting.
What seemed to be a human head appeared, moving jerkily. A man, limping, in no better condition than a zombie—if if he were not one already—came into view and stood looking at Cole. He held a Glock by his side in a skinned and bloodied hand. His leg was bound in duct tape from ankle to thigh, and his whole appearance was ragged and tattered, every square inch of his clothing ripped and his face so beaten and swollen as to defy recognition.
Cole followed him with the 1911, though his hand shook badly. At last he lowered the gun. “Brandon?”
A dark hole opened in the man’s battered face. No sound that Cole could hear came from it. Cole struggled to his feet on one leg, bracing himself against the truck tire. “Emily, it’s Brandon! He’s alive!”
Brandon staggered forward, moaning hoarsely.
Cole stared at his disfigured face, watching his mouth move.
“They’re coming,” Brandon said. “Coughers.”
Cole looked over Brandon’s shoulder and saw nothing. He limped to the truck and climbed into the cab dragging his leg. Emily sat on the passenger side, both her feet on the dash, her pants discarded in a wad in the floor and the seat beneath her wet with amniotic fluid and her white legs shining. Sweat stood out on her brow.
“He’s coming!” she said in a terrified voice. “I’m going to have to push!”
“Okay, okay,” Cole said, reaching across her to unlock her door and push it open. “We’ve got to go, just one more time.”
“I can’t do that!”
“I’m going to help you, okay?”
“You’re bleeding!” Emily cried. “Are you shot?”
“I’m okay,” Cole said, trying to scoop up her legs and turn her sideways in the seat. He looked between her legs and nearly passed out. “Oh shit, he’s really coming, isn’t he?”
“What the bloody hell have I been telling you?”
“Okay, okay!”
Brandon appeared outside Emily’s door, reaching up for her.
“I can’t believe you’re alive,” Emily said, reaching for Brandon’s neck as Cole lowered her, hands under her arms.
“Barely,” Brandon said.
Cole struggled down the steps and the three made their way, in a kind of mutant shuffle toward the armored vehicle.
“I think I can
walk,” Emily offered, right before another contraction came and she turned her face up to the sky in open-mouthed anguish, uttering an astonished cry.
“We’ve got you,” Cole breathed, pushing through the pain and using Walsh’s backside for a stepping stool against the side of the armored vehicle. “Put your foot against that rung and hold on!” he commanded.
Emily gritted her teeth and held one of the steel rungs welded to the armor plating while Brandon pushed her over his head, both elbows locked and his head bowed in agony. Cole climbed to the top of the armored vehicle and collapsed, his wet pants leg smearing blood across the armor plating like a paint brush. Chloe’s body was there, unmoved, but did not block their path to the open hatch.
“Almost there!” Cole said, reaching back for Emily. He had just glimpsed the horde in the distance, though not from the direction he expected, and not as far away as he had hoped. They had apparently passed by once, then doubled back, drawn by the sound of the gunshots, close enough now to see their faces.
Cole pulled Emily up until he could rock backwards and let her fall across him. Emily rolled off, getting to her hands and knees and crawling desperately toward the hatch. Cole reached down for Brandon’s hand, but Brandon pulled it away.
“Give me your gun!” he said hoarsely.
“Just come on!” Cole said.
“Give me the damn gun and get her inside!” Brandon demanded.
“Only a few rounds left,” Cole said, passing it to him.
Brandon grunted and turned to face the onrushing horde, a pistol in each hand.
Cole dragged himself to the hatch. Somehow Emily had already got herself into it. Cole lowered himself through the manhole after her, steadying himself when he felt the floor beneath his boots and reaching back up to pull the hatch shut, turning the screw wildly as pistol shots sounded and what sliver of pure sunlight remained was sealed off forever.