49
Crow "City" couldn't have been more than ten buildings, total. The general store, the post office. A hardware store. A place that sold feed and tack. A bar, and two liquor stores – and Christopher figured the ratio of booze establishments to total buildings implied a lot about living in Crow City.
They were passing by the city hall/courthouse/sheriff's station when something darted out of the darkness. It burst from the black nothing that seemed to swallow everything only a few feet away from the Maruader, a drop of ink that flowed out of the shadows and then flung itself in front of the vehicle.
Aaron shouted at the same time that Amulek hit the brakes so hard he rose up in his seat. They hadn't been moving fast – probably barely thirty miles per hour – but it still seemed like the Marauder took forever to come to a halt.
Momentum is not our friend.
Before they shuddered to a stop, there was a solid, meaty kuthud from the front right of the vehicle. It sounded like it came from far away – two layers of armor shielding provided a surprising amount of noise insulation – but Christopher flinched like he'd just been punched in the gut.
"Was it… was it…?" Maggie didn't finish. Didn't have to. Christopher could see the question on her face. Could see it in Buck's expression, the flit of Theresa's eyes.
Was that one of them? Or did we just hit a person?
"I don't know," said Aaron. "I didn't see." His voice came out as a harsh whisper. He was hunched low in the seat, and now he peeked over the low edge of the window. "Still can't."
"Had to be one of them," said Buck. "No person would run out at a car like that." Like Aaron, his voice was low. Worried. "No one."
"Unless it was someone who saw the car," said Maggie. "Maybe someone trying to flag us down and they just fell?"
"No way to tell, short of getting out," said Theresa.
"No thank you," said Buck.
Amulek snapped his fingers for attention. Gestured out his window. Aaron leaned over, looking out.
Christopher turned in his seat. He was seated directly behind Amulek, and there was a window set in the armor plating between them. He looked through.
"Damn," he whispered.
It wasn't a person. Not as Christopher understood the word anymore. The zombie had hit the front right of the car, then must have been pulled under by the wheel, hung up on something below the Marauder, torn to bits in a fraction of a second. Now it was just a torso attached to a head and a single arm that was clawing an aimless path through the dirt.
"Go," Aaron said to Amulek.
"Wait," said Christopher. Shouted it, really. He looked at the creature that was pulling itself along the road. It had almost reached the sidewalk, guts spilling from its body cavity in dark, glistening knots.
"Why?" said Aaron. "We gotta get moving. Before more come."
"I know, just…." A froth appeared where the creature had been wounded. Sealing the gashes, the tears. The glistening yellow substance Christopher had seen before. The zombie took no notice, just kept pulling its way up toward the sidewalk on the far side of the street.
It was now about twenty feet from the Marauder.
"What the hell are we doing?" growled Theresa. "Let's get going."
"Christopher," said Aaron. Christopher ignored the cowboy. Just kept watching the zombie as it crawled.
Up the sidewalk.
Twenty-five feet away.
Thirty.
Black ichor trailed behind it.
"Christopher, we should go before more come," said Aaron.
"Why is it doing that?" said Christopher.
"What?" said Buck.
Maggie understood. "It's crawling away." She didn't leave her seat, but craned her neck to see as the zombie pulled itself away, inch after inch. "Why is it crawling away?"
"The doodad," said Buck. He pointed at the remote, still wedged in Hope's pocket. "It must have been like what happened to the others. It got called, then got in range of the remote, got confused, and left."
Christopher shook his head. The creature's wounds were completely sealed. It kept pulling itself away. Silent. Almost lost in the darkness now.
"I don't think that's it, Buck. Aaron, was it even attacking the car in the first place?"
"I don't know." The cowboy shrugged. "Just seemed to run out in front of it, almost like…."
"Like it was confused?"
"Maybe." Aaron squinted. "What are you getting at, son?"
The zombie wore the remains of a white t-shirt with a red collar. The collar stood out as garish and nearly obscene. A mockery of the blood that had been spilled through all this.
He shook his head. "I don't know. I…."
Then something sparkled in the headlights. A light. Two lights. Four. Ten.
Eyes.
Zombies, crowding the narrow road in front of them.
50
The eyes sparkled the way that animals' eyes did – catching the Marauder's headlights and casting them back as a series of diamond sparkles that stole all warmth; left only a sense of sterile emptiness.
The creatures weren't moving.
"What are they waiting for?" murmured Aaron.
Christopher was pretty sure it was a rhetorical question, but it was the same thing going through his own head. The zombies were many things: fast, nearly indestructible, crap-your-pants scary… but subtle wasn't one of them. For the most part, they had two basic modes: Attack, and Attack More.
These were doing neither. They just stood there. Three were on one of the street's narrow lanes, hunched together near a liquor store curb like the world's most grisly delinquents. The other two were in the middle of the street, just… laying there.
But when the Marauder's lights washed over them, all the creatures looked up. The three that were near the liquor store ambled to the point where the twin cones of the headlights converged. A strange, lurching shamble that was totally unlike the smooth lope Christopher had grown accustomed to seeing in the creatures.
The three approached the Marauder. They passed the two who were laying on the street, and those two stood. As they did, the five of them drew into a knot. The instant it happened, a subtle change came over all five of the creatures. Some of the jerkiness fell away from their movements. Instead of lurching they now walked. They drew low to the ground, no longer standing tall as would an unsuspecting person, but rather crouching like….
Soldiers. Behind enemy lines.
Their faces, which Christopher could see clearly in the headlights, changed as well. The ones near the liquor store had seemed… vaguely Buckish, for lack of a better term. Irritated. Pissed off with the world.
The ones on the street had been blank. Faces a total vacuum, like people in comas. Barely more than vegetables.
But when the three stood and came to the two on the street, when the two on the street stood and joined them, when all five turned their collective gaze on the Marauder….
Christopher shivered.
The blankness was gone. The vague irritation had been replaced by rage.
The zombies crouched a few inches lower.
"Go," whispered Aaron.
But before Amulek could move, the zombies leaped forward.
Toward the Marauder.
And the survivors inside.
51
This time, Amulek listened to Aaron.
Christopher expected him to put the Marauder in reverse, to slam on the accelerator and back them away from the creatures as fast as the huge vehicle would go. But the war-car lurched forward.
Christopher shouted. A half-begun, vaguely-formed sentence that was more idea than real protestation. Not all the way to "Go back," but more than a grunt. And it never got to anything resembling a coherent word, let alone a full command.
Because he looked behind them.
The rear of the Marauder had a rectangular window, barely more than a slit in the armor.
It was enough to see the other creatures, streaming out of the dark
ness.
Five.
Ten.
Twenty.
More.
Christopher looked away.
The Marauder illuminated the creatures in front of them. Four of them hit and disappeared under the hood. Not even impacted yet, they just disappeared under the thing's great height. Then the minute impact a moment later – whud-whu-wh-whud.
Christopher turned again. Saw things spewing out behind the Marauder. Much more than four bodies. Bits and pieces that twitched and spasmed as they rolled across the dusty road, disappeared in the night.
The creatures running after the vehicle leaped over what was left of their brothers and sisters.
Thud.
Christopher looked to the front of the Marauder again.
The fifth zombie hadn't fallen.
It had jumped.
It was on the hood. Crawling toward them.
52
The Marauder didn't sway in the slightest. Amulek might as well have been going to the store for a gallon of milk for all the attention he paid to the thing clawing its way over the hood toward them.
He must kill at Grand Theft Auto.
Christopher glanced back. The things – now perhaps a hundred, maybe even more – were still behind them. Keeping pace with the Marauder.
They're getting faster.
He had to resist the urge to pound the seat and scream, "No fair!"
Something thudded. The zombie on the hood had made it to the front windshield. Judging by its jeans and black t-shirt the thing had once been a man, though its face was nearly bereft of flesh, so for all Christopher knew it could have been a hermaphrodite or a female art history student. Whatever its gender, it slammed its free fist against the windshield. Again, again.
The fist crumpled. Turned into a mix of crushed bone, flesh, and blood held together by a leaking sack of ruptured skin.
It kept pounding. The fist gradually disappeared into the thing's wrist, which pulverized into its forearm.
It was, Christopher suspected, going to beat itself to pieces against the reinforced glass.
Someone was screaming. He thought it was Maggie, but it might have been Buck – the big man had a comically high-pitched voice.
Christopher filed away the fact that he'd have to bust the guy about that. Then he realized that he was the one screaming.
He shut his mouth. Looked behind the Marauder. The things back there still weren't falling behind. Illuminated by the red taillights, so they all looked like they were swimming through blood, clawing their way through pools of fluid in search of death.
"Faster," he said. Meant to shout it, but all that came out was a throaty whisper. Amulek grunted. A sound of pure air that was nevertheless more vocalization than Christopher had heard from him to date. And it was clear: Shut up and let me drive. You just sit there and stay busy wetting your pants.
Christopher wondered why Amulek didn't swerve a bit, try to toss the zombie on the hood off the Marauder. Then he realized that they were going full-speed, with a group of murderous monsters behind them. Amulek probably figured that any such maneuver would lose them critical speed.
And he was probably right.
GTA king, for sure.
The zombie on the hood stopped slamming its nub of a forearm against the windshield – which was smeared with dark fluid and bits of flesh. For a moment Christopher thought he glimpsed a pair of baleful eyes. Not reflecting the headlights this time, they seemed to burn with an inner fire. Hell couched in wrecked meat and dark ichor.
Then the zombie clambered up. On the roof.
53
There was hardly any noise.
That scared Christopher.
He could tell it scared everyone else, too.
Once he put a bootleg M-80 firecracker in the mailbox of his boarding school. Most M-80s still available in the U.S. – what had once been the U.S. – are red plastic tubes with fifty milligrams or less of low explosive flash powder or black powder. The powder is designed to make noise and light, but to minimize actual explosive power.
The one that Christopher put in the mailbox – an antique-looking thing that sat at the front of the long driveway to the school – was red plastic. It had a fuse. But instead of fifty milligrams of black powder, it had been packed with closer to three thousand milligrams of powder, along with picric acid. Picric acid, he had been told by the student who sold it to him, was related to TNT – a fact that Christopher verified on Wikipedia before buying the M-80.
When it blew, it took out not only the mailbox, but the post it sat on, the ground below, and a sizable chunk of the curb nearby.
Still, the explosion wasn't what Christopher remembered most about the experience. Nor was it the elation of knowing that no one else was going to get mail for a while – a nice feeling, since the other kids had been hassling him about his lack of personal mail from family or friends for the last few months.
No, it was the silence.
He lit the fuse and used a silver strip of duct tape to fix it to the front of the mailbox. Then he ran like hell, all the way across the street to where a small stand of trees afforded some protection from what he figured would be an epic blast.
The fuse burned down.
There was a small puff, barely visible in the night.
Then… nothing.
The entire world seemed to slow down. There was only the silence of a night that should have been torn apart by an explosion and instead stood whole and unblemished.
He remembered the argument he had with himself: Do I go? Do I stay?
If I go I might get blown up.
If I stay, they'll find the M-80. They'll probably dust for prints or something and I'll be boned.
I should go.
Screw that.
But what if –
And over it all, the silence. A moth flew across the face of the mailbox, and he couldn't hear it of course, even though it had to be a huge moth for him to see it at this distance. He should have heard the wings like hammers smashing into the front of the mailbox.
Nothing.
Still.
Expectant.
I should –
BOOM.
Part of the mailbox embedded itself in the tree only six inches from where his fingers curled around the trunk. He barely remembered that, either.
Just that silence. That sense of something huge, something awful about to happen.
Just like now.
Everyone looked up. The only person who didn't was Amulek, staring straight ahead as he guided the Marauder through the night at its top speed.
Still no sound.
And then… the silence was broken.
Christopher expected the creature above to return to its original tactic: the venerable "Beat Myself to Paste Against a Tank" technique.
But there wasn't a thud. No muffled slam.
Instead: a hiss.
Buck understood what was happening first. His high-pitched voice screamed through the cargo space.
"MOVE!"
54
The acid the things spewed was black. Except in the dark. In the absence of light, in yet one more of the impossibilities that had become the only reality since the Change, the stuff glowed with a strange purple/blue/black that reminded Christopher of lights at a rave.
Now, rave lights began gathering on the roof of the Marauder, right above Maggie. The first drop fell just as Buck grabbed her and yanked her away, practically piling all of them – Buck, Maggie, and the two girls they still held – into Christopher's and Theresa's laps.
Hiss.
Hissssss….
The purple fell, shifting the red interior of the vehicle to a new color, vibrant and strange. It dripped at first, then a sudden stream poured through the roof as a hole the size of Christopher's fist opened there. The liquid continued for a moment, hitting the seat and part of the Marauder's flooring.
Thankfully, none of it splashed on anyone. A single drop had streaked down Aaron's arm
a few days ago, and the chemical burn had sent the man into a momentary panic of pain, an agony so intense even he couldn't control himself.
Christopher saw a hole open in the floor as the acid chewed right through it. Then he saw something that made his blood stop in his veins.
The acid fell through the floor. Gone. He felt the Marauder lurch and suspected the back right wheels had run over some of the stuff. His blood started up again, but now it was running backward – how far were they going to get on three wheels?
He glanced back at the things behind them. They didn't seem to be gaining. Yet.
Then he looked back at the thing that had terrified him. The hole in the floor. Still growing, wider and wider as the acid ate at the edges, disintegrating them, creating a space that was first the size of a fist, then the size of a plate.
And if the one on the floor was growing, then what about….
Christopher looked up in time to see the zombie on the roof push through the gaping hole there.
It was inside the Marauder.
55
Christopher had called the things that had turned Hope's and Lizzy's insides into jungle gyms "bees." And now he realized that the zombies bore another resemblance to those insects.
Bees – at least honeybees – could only sting once.
The creature on the hood had been a mess of blood, its face chewed to nearly nothing.
The creature inside was far, far worse.
The acid it had secreted had burned its jaw to a charred mass that crumbled to dust as the thing fell to the floor of the Marauder. Its chest had burned away as well, blackened sternum and scorched ribs clearly visible through the tattered remains of the thing's shirt. The arm that it had pounded against the windshield fell from its shoulder, a spastic length of flesh with a joint in the middle, spewing ichor at both ends until that yellow wax sealed it off.
A clicking noise came from somewhere deep in its throat. The flesh of its face continued to blacken just as with the roof and floor of the Marauder, the dregs of the acid kept eating away at whatever matter they contacted.
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