“Connor better show up or I’ll kill him,” Nicole said, turning down the volume.
There was a silence as they continued on another two blocks and finally found the T-intersection to Farmers Road.
It was chaos.
A dozen cars were piled up in the middle, headlights stabbing up into treetops, onto the curbs, onto the upside down interiors of overturned cars. The other cars driving on the road did their best to circumvent the grim sculpture of vehicular death but only succeeded in causing a horn-blaring traffic jam. Everyone still alive was intent on getting to the Jefferson Bridge.
But that wasn’t the worst part. Half the town, now hissers, climbed on the pileup like ants on a dead rodent. They leapt off and ran across the lanes attacking anyone who couldn’t get around.
“There’s so many of them,” Seth said. “Who are these people?”
“I don’t recognize anyone,” Nicole said.
“At least there are real people driving,” Seth continued, his voice slightly more hopeful. “We’re not the only ones. We need to all get together or something. Strength in numbers and all that.”
“But it’s like they don’t even know what they’re seeing,” Amanita replied. “Why are they still trying to drive by? They need to get off the road now, not try to squeeze around.”
Nicole turned off the headlights. The undead hadn’t paid them any mind yet, no doubt too focused on the cars right in front of them. “This is panic, madness. Where are the cops?”
In front of them a man and his small son were being dragged from their car. The father reached for his little boy, yelled, “Close your eyes, Travis. Close your—” and was slashed and bitten by four men and a woman with half-eaten faces. Travis’s young screams made everyone’s hair stand up, the sound like nails on a chalkboard. His innocent eyes were still open when the first bearded face swooped in and bit his lips off. In seconds the little boy’s body was torn in two, one pack of flesh-eaters running off with his legs, the other group running away with his tiny head and torso.
Nicole slowly backed the SUV up. “No way. We can’t get through this.”
In front of them, the father rose from the ground, his throat opened wide, his severed left arm still lying near his feet. He opened his yellow eyes and hissed at the line of cars backed up to the south. With a jump he launched himself at them. When he landed, he bent down over a collection of severed abandoned appendages, rolled in the meat and gristle like a dog in a pile of trash, and then rose again.
Where his arm had been ripped off at the shoulder there was now a new “arm.” A woman’s leg, chewed in half just a few inches above the knee, had attached itself. He studied it for a brief moment. He looked dumbfounded, as if questioning his act, this new addition. It was not the look of a man who’d made a conscious choice, it was the look of an animal bewildered by its own instinctual movements. The leg bent up and down at the knee, the foot flapping its high-heeled shoe on the end as it responded to neural requests meant for a hand.
He paid it no more mind. He took off running, no longer a father, no longer human.
Saturday, 11:32
The street was empty, dark, abandoned. Somewhere behind him he heard an explosion, a siren. Were the cops fighting back? Was anybody?
And where the hell am I?
Connor risked a look back over his shoulder. He could hear the mobs of flesh-eaters on nearby streets, but he seemed to have outwit the giant pack that had been chasing him. Maybe they were still tangled in the swingset.
There will be more, he warned himself.
He stopped and bent over in the shadows of a small apartment complex. People were talking inside one of the units. Real people. Live people.
Correction: they weren’t talking, they were pleading.
Then he heard the muffled pop and saw the flash of white in the window above him. There were more: pop pop pop! A bullet screamed out the window, raining glass to the lawn. Now Connor could hear the struggle going on inside.
A woman shouted: “Get it off! Get it off!”
Someone answered: pop pop pop!
There was hissing and the sounds of flimsy furniture shattering.
To his continual dismay, he saw loping silhouettes at the end of the road, coming his way.
“I can’t run anymore. Please, God, I can’t.” He was not religious and only realized he was praying on a subconscious level. It was more the idea that wherever these inhuman creatures had come from must have an opposite pole, and if that pole existed it could only be the ultimate good.
Which meant it was either Santa Claus or God.
Unless God was the cause of this. Then where did that leave everybody? Praying to a savior who was upstairs right now sucking down suds and watching Castor tear itself apart like a lame reality show.
No, that was ridiculous, whatever was causing this mass transformation of the living into the dead was not supernatural. It was a viral or chemical reaction, something biological that could be transmitted and passed from human to human. It was the only way to explain the biting and sudden resurrections.
“Did we make this shit, God? This our doing? Because I didn’t get a vote. And I can’t run.”
The faintest bit of moonlight fell on the silhouettes as they jogged closer. Maybe ten of them all together. A few old, a few young, a few fat, a few thin—a cross section of the town, except normal Castor folk didn’t drag their intestines behind them. Even at this distance, their ravaged skin and gaping wounds were easily discernable.
From out of the window above him, a body fell to the complex’s cement path, landed so hard on the back of its head that the front teeth knocked together and broke out. They bounced like little Legos in front of Connor’s feet.
He looked up and saw the hisser leaning out the window. It was getting ready to jump out.
He launched himself off the complex’s front wall and bolted across the street. Chances were the approaching mob saw him now, chances were even better the hisser in the window saw him.
It didn’t matter. He had to keep going or die.
Legs pumping, chest burning, eyes watering, he sprinted down the road, hoping like hell he was going the right way.
He only registered the small white car out of the corner of his eye because of what was hanging from its door. He stopped short, ran back, stared in amazement. The keys were still in the door. He knew this because the hand holding the keys was still gripping them.
The hand’s owner, however, was nowhere in sight.
Saturday, 11:38
The police station was across a major boulevard, a wide open field of green on one side of it and a large parking lot on the other. It offered almost no cover but presumably this was by design. Any perps making a run for it wouldn’t have anywhere to hide and would have to be content with a major roadway.
And it had lights on!
Only a handful of cars passed them as they sped toward the beacon of safety. Seth cheered and the two girls followed suit. After all the time he’d spent with cops and detectives and criminalists when Joana was taken, all the times they’d asked him why he didn’t scream, he never thought he’d be happy to see law enforcement again.
It looked like people were moving around inside. “Must be a backup generator,” he said. “Something that kicks on in case of an emergency. They may even have phones and Internet.”
Amanita nodded her head. “Well, I’d call this an emergency. And here I thought Castor was clearly run by retards.”
Nicole turned the SUV into the parking lot, parked next to the only black and white car in view. “They’d better let me use their phone to call my mom. She always keeps her cell on her.”
Seth merely nodded, once again not sure how to approach the subject of Nicole’s mom. But she had a point. If they had phones in the police station maybe they could all find their parents. He’d been so scared about getting here alive that for a minute or two he’d actually forgotten about his missing mother and father. Did that mean he
didn’t care?
There were days when he felt that way, when he wanted to run away, because he knew they were still mad at him and it was like living underwater. They looked at him through a haze sometimes, didn’t hear what he said.
The worst was two months ago, at the dinner table, when his mother had just gotten up from a nap. She had said, “Your grandmother wants to know what you want for your birthday, Jo.” She had paused, looked at her food, then continued. “Seth. You should call her.”“
Seth had let it go. So had his father. Mom was on lots of antidepressants and he knew it. He knew he was the cause of it. He hated them for making it so obvious day after day how much their lives had been ruined by him.
“What if they ask me for a license,” Nicole said.
The statement seemed so absurd it broke Seth from his black reverie. “Then I’ll come visit you in the joint. You gotta throw the first punch in there or end up someone’s bitch. You can shank some ho with a sharp spoon handle, too. Low and under the ribs.”
Amanita spun around and glared. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just saying. You wanna run with bangers you gotta play the game straight up.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Whatever. It’s from a video game.”
“Again with the games.”
“It’s a good game. You can steal cars and have sex with hookers—”
Nicole opened her door. “Can we just go in already?”
The three of them exited the SUV and walked in the front door of the police station. The generator lights attached to the walls threw a sallow hue over all the desks and vending machines.
A female officer looked up from her cell phone when she saw the door open. She was standing behind the reception desk, sweating. Evidently the backup power did not control the AC. Behind her was an open hallway with six or seven offices off it. To her left was a large room with a collection of desks.
Seth waved, about to say hi.
She pulled her gun and aimed it. “Stay back! I’ll shoot you!”
Nicole, Seth and Amanita threw their hands in the air and fell to their faces. “We’re not those things,” Nicole yelled. “We’re okay. Don’t shoot.”
“How do I know you’re not one of them?”
“Because we’re talking, because I just drove here and I even stopped at the stop signs.”
“She did,” Seth said, “it drove me nuts.”
“Would one of those things drive?” Nicole continued. “They just run and bite. Please put the gun away, I want to call my mom.”
There was a tiny click as the gun’s hammer fell back in place. She actually cocked it, Seth thought, she was going to shoot us. Suddenly all his video game achievements didn’t seem so grand. It was one thing to be a marksman with pixilated characters, another thing to try and outrun bullets in real life.
The officer came around the desk, “I’m gonna frisk you just to be safe okay. Don’t take it personal.”
She ran her hands up and down Seth’s legs and even patted his groin real quick. It was the first time a woman had touched him there. He blushed.
“Okay, stand up, all of you. How’d you get in the door?”
“We just opened it,” Seth said.
The cop studied the station’s front door. “Son-of-a-bitching backup system’s got everything screwed up. Only supposed to open when I buzz you in. And don’t even say it. We obviously know about what’s going on out there. We have no idea what it is. One second we’re getting calls up the ass about some jackass kid having a party that’s pissing off the neighbors and the next Castor is blind and deaf and under attack.”
For the first time Seth noticed there were no phones ringing, no fingers tapping on keyboards. The lights were on, sure, but no one was home.
“Where is everybody?” He craned his neck to look into the room with all the desks. On the cop shows that room was always full of detectives making jokes with each other. Now it was a ghost town.
“Out there. Haven’t heard a peep from the radios in about five minutes. The damn thing is on but no one’s calling in.”
“The phones aren’t working?” Nicole asked.
“Not in here. And not my cell either. Complete power failure and phone silence. Goddamn plane must have taken out the cell towers somehow. I’m giving it another minute or two here and then I’m hopping in my cruiser and taking the bridge out for help.”
“Just don’t go down Farmers,” Seth said. “It’s like the apocalypse. Those things are everywhere. We just came from there and I can’t even describe it.”
“Figures. Farmers is the only way to the bridge, too. You didn’t see any other jockeys out there, did you?”
“You mean on horses,” Amanita asked.
Even Seth was confused at that one.
“No, jockeys, cruiser jockeys. Cops. Sorry, inside joke. My ex boyfriend is a cop, he’s out there somewhere and I can’t really think too straight not knowing where he is. I’m trying to work things out with him, you know? He has a mustache. See anyone like that?”
“None,” Nicole answered. “We didn’t see any cops where we were. But we were still about a mile from the bridge so if they all went that way maybe that’s where he is. Couldn’t see it from where we were. We’d have died if I’d tried to get to it.”
Seth sat in one of the waiting chairs against the wall. “So what do we do now? Can’t you protect us, take us somewhere? We have to get out of town, find our parents.”
“Look, they don’t train us for this. We’re just people, you know. We’re not prepared for…whatever the hell this is. I’d call SWAT in from Jefferson but as we already covered there’s no phone working here. I can put you all in the back of my car and take you with me but if something happens you’ll be trapped back there. I don’t know if that’s a good idea to be honest.”
Nicole held up the keys to her mom’s SUV. “It’s cool, we have a car. We just don’t know if we can get out on the roads the way they are. Plus I still want to find my mom.”
“Me too,” Seth said.
The cop looked Nicole up and down. “You look a little young to drive.”
“I’m legal. I just, um, left my license at home.”
“You don’t have to lie, honey, I’m not gonna arrest you. Not in the middle of all this insanity. But if you’re saying you wanna drive out of here then I want you to be careful. How old are you anyway?”
“Fourteen.”
“We’re all fourteen,” Amanita said. “And let me get this straight, you’re turning us away? The police are turning away people in need? Fucking fantastic.”
“I’m not turning you away and I’ll thank you not to mouth off to me. I’m telling you there’s nothing I can do. I need to go to Jefferson and see if the phones are working. If you want to stay here I can lock you in the jail cell but there are seven people in there already, one of whom I wouldn’t put anywhere near a young teenage girl so I advise you to find someplace better to hide until we can fix this situation.”
“Leave us here, lock the doors.”
“I’m not leaving kids or anyone else alone here.”
“What about a gun?” Seth asked. “Can you give us a gun then?”
“Let me think about it. Nope.”
Behind them, the door opened.
Saturday, 11:45
The SUV was parked in the police station parking lot. Only one other police cruiser filled the empty spaces next to it. Castor had something like twenty-two officers, Connor knew, which was not a whole lot, but even still the precinct looked completely desolate.
But, it had lights and that was a big plus. He imagined his friends inside, sipping warm tea, listening to police scanners. Or maybe they were huddled together crying through the pain of losing everything. That’s what he felt like doing, just curling up in a ball and crying his eyes out.
The overwhelming need to lash out and hit something came over him but he fought it down. If he survived he would h
ave time to curse the world, curse God, curse the town of Castor.
He parked the car, left the blood-stained keys in the ignition, and entered the police station.
His three friends, sitting near the reception desk, turned and for a second didn’t seem to recognize him. Then Nicole broke free of the group and rushed at him, threw her arms around him and buried her face in his neck. “I didn’t think you’d make it. Oh my God, I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
“That a good or bad thing?”
She backed off him as Amanita and Seth crowded around him. “Sorry. I just can’t lose anyone else right now.”
“It’s okay. I’m here.” The sense of being wanted and needed helped numb some of the pain, helped him keep thoughts of his mother and father at bay. It almost felt good, except that there was nothing to feel good about this night.
Seth laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Damn, you run fast. I saw you take off down the street and those things were on your tail but I knew you’d make it. That’s why you play front line. You can be in the shit and survive, man.”
“It wasn’t easy. When I buy my first house remind me to get a swing set.” With a nod of his head he indicated the female police officer studying him with caution. “So what’s going on with the cops?”
The officer stepped forward and cocked her head. “The cops are in the shit, too, as I was telling you’re friends. There’s not much I can do because we have no phone contact with Jefferson, and we need their SWAT team. Your friends say Farmers road is under attack but I’m willing to risk getting to the bridge to get some real help. And you’re bleeding pretty badly from your shin there. Come on back here. I’ll get a first aid kit.”
All four teens followed the officer back into a lime green room with a giant table ringed by metal fold up chairs. Connor ran his finger over an unintelligible name that had been carved in the table top. If he squinted just right it looked like it read Maynard.
The officer left them and returned with the first aid kit and opened it on the table, removed gauze and iodine. “Let me see that gash.”
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