“It’s like a million snakes,” Nicole said, hands over her ears. She peered up through the car windows once more, her terrified glance saying all that needed to be said, and then sat back down. “They’re just running around the plane, looking for us. They move so damned fast I can’t even focus on them. You don’t think they can smell us, do you?”
“I have no idea. But sooner or later they’re gonna wander over here. We need to jet across the street and get behind the market fast but we’re gonna need serious luck on our side. Then we can get up to the fort and wait for Seth and Amanita.”
“And if they don’t show up?”
“We climb down the cliff, I guess. I don’t see any other choice. We’ve got the flash drives, we’ve got to get out of here alive. Our parents would want that.”
“I know. What if we distract them, those things, maybe throw something.”
“I already thought of that but there’s nothing to throw. Maybe these small rocks on the ground but I don’t know that a noise like that will really get their attention. They make so much noise themselves that they must have hunter’s ears. They’re waiting for something distinctly human. If I were a ventriloquist I’d throw my voice but—”
Nicole grabbed his knee and squeezed. “Wait, if this is unlocked then I’ve got an idea.” She gripped the handle of the police cruiser and lifted it. The door opened without any protest. Thank God for small miracles, thought Connor.
She slid up into the seat like a worm, slithered her way across the passenger seat and picked up the radio headset in the dead cop’s hand. The key was still in the ignition, the battery still on. She pressed the thumb switch on the handset and whispered. “Testing. One, two three.”
Her voice wafted out of another police cruiser, two vehicles down. The hissers near the plane began to spin in circles.
Connor realized her plan now and hoped the other cruisers near the plane were still running. “It’s working,” he said. “They can hear it. Keep talking.”
Nicole pressed the button again. “Hey, you ugly bastards, I’m over here.”
Connor peeked around the back of the car and smiled as the hissers raged and attacked a police cruiser on the far side of the fuselage. “Perfect! They ran around the other side. Let’s go!”
Nicole slithered back out of the car and together they raced toward the supermarket. As they ran across the street, they each kept their eyes on the nearby fuselage. None of the undead took notice as they were too busy trying to break into the abandoned cruisers.
Sunday, 10:15am
The sun was cresting in the sky, a brilliant white pearl on blue satin. The temperature was heating up the roads, evaporating the morning dew. Insects were flitting on the awnings of buildings, butterflies were exploring rose gardens and flower boxes, squirrels collected seeds in the park and carried them into the hollows of trees. Seth and Amanita ran behind the hardware stores and record shops and bakeries of Castor, ropes and a new shiny ax bobbing their hands.
The first of the rapid, chasing footsteps began when they drew close to Frederick Street, which would lead them toward the back of the supermarket. At first, neither turned to look, too afraid of what they might see. But Seth couldn’t contain himself anymore, he had to know what was behind them.
He turned and nearly tripped over his own feet. “Run!” he shouted.
Amanita screamed and moved as fast as her spindly legs would carry her.
The hissing reverberated off the backs of the buildings, like the swishing of a tidal wave.
“Here!” Seth shouted, and pulled her into a tight alley between two buildings. A cracked and bloody face appeared at once, arms reaching in for them. Without hesitation Amanita swung the axe, the blade coming down on top of the monster’s head. The blade wedged in and spilt the skull down the middle, one half of a face falling left, the other half falling right. The hisser went down on its knees and crumpled in a ball. Immediately, more yellow eyes and groping hands filled the emptiness behind the dead creature. Amanita swung again, catching the closest monster in the teeth. Molars and gums whistled by Seth’s ears and splattered against the brick walls on either side of him. Amanita pulled the axe back and swung again, hitting the next one in the sternum, knocking it backwards on its ass, the axe stuck tight in its chest.
More appeared, leaping over the unmoving bodies on the ground.
“This way,” Seth shouted, sprinting toward the main road, his bare chest slick with sweat. His elbows scraped the brick walls as he ran, ripping the skin off to the bone. He didn’t care, this was pain in the face of survival. This was what every gamer thought about when running around imaginary lands online, trying to outwit other humans in a game of life and death. But those who died online respawned in seconds to fight again. This was different. This was real. There was no coming back from this if they were caught. Just like Joana.
He’d lost that game, and she’d never returned. Losing Amanita was not an option.
Behind him, a gray arm snapped out and grabbed Amanita by the shoulder, began pulling her back to the rotund dead man it belonged to. She screamed and flailed but was too small to fight the large hisser.
“Seth! Seth!”
He turned and saw her go down on the ground.
“No!” He ran full speed toward the undead man trying to take this girl from him. He didn’t see the man’s bloody face or torn flesh, he only saw his parents, the cops who had questioned him, and the strange, bearded stick man that had stole into his bedroom when he was six.
He hit the beast in the chest, knocking it back into the bodies behind it. He swung the spools of rope and hit another hisser in the mouth, staggering it.
Amanita was up and running already, calling his name, screaming bloody murder.
He turned and ran, his belly rippling as he poured every ounce of energy into his legs.
They cleared the edge of the building, and ran into the parking lot that connected the small private businesses. Across the street, two wandering, undead women spotted them and came running.
“Down here,” Am shouted, leading them down another alley toward the back of the buildings again. They ducked behind a dumpster and pressed up tight against it. The two ragged women sped down the alley and turned right behind the buildings, their anguished cry exploding into the air.
In the parking lot, hordes of undead ran by the alley. But the running began to slow, and soon they were milling about out front, spinning in circles, sniffing the air. Too many of them stood at the entrance to the alley for Seth and Am to get up and run.
“We’re trapped,” Amanita whispered. “I don’t want to die, Seth. Oh God, it’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt and I don’t want it to.”
Yeah, it’s gonna hurt like hell, Seth thought. And what was worse, they would probably come back as those things. Then what? They’d get burned to a crisp when the military fried the town. They were so close to the market, so close to the woods on the other side and the fort where Connor and Nicole might be waiting for them.
Amanita grabbed his arm and hugged him close, buried her face in his puffy shoulder. “I’m sorry, I thought we could hide here.”
“It’s fine. We’d be dead out there. Least here they can’t see us.”
“They’ll find us in minutes. Oh God, I don’t want to be eaten like that. It’s gonna hurt, Seth.”
“Just don’t think about it.”
“Seth?”
“What?”
“Will you kiss me once more? Just in case. I just…I want to feel like someone cares when I die. I need to know someone loves me.”
She was crying, squeezing his hand. He wanted to kiss her more than anything in the world. Wanted to show her he did care. Cared about her, cared about Jo, cared about every child neglected or forgotten, who died alone or lived alone, wondering why Mom and Dad had forsaken them. For the stolen, for the murdered, for the abandoned.
For the sister he should have protected, and the girl he hadn’t realized he’d bee
n protecting until now.
“I don’t want to die alone,” she continued. “When they come, hold my hand okay?”
She slipped her hand into his, their fingers intertwining. “Please kiss me.”
He leaned forward and met her lips.
He tasted their sweat, tasted the salt of their fear. He felt her tongue rest against his. There was nothing sexual about it, just the fierce yearning of two young people attempting to share their love and fear, two people trying so hard to become one in the only way they knew how. He didn’t want Amanita to hurt. She was the first girl who’d looked past his ugly body and geeky passions. Her toughness had broken down to reveal the same thing lurking inside that everyone his age must feel: fear. She may be a bitch on the outside, but she is more human on the inside than most people I know.
He let go of her, and dropped the ropes in her lap. “Get these to Connor. Tell him this makes me a level fifty, he’ll know what I mean.”
“What? What are you doing?”
“Am, I love you. I know I hardly know you, but I know I love you. And I’m tried of saying I’m gonna act but never actually acting. Now don’t make me do this for nothing. Get going as soon as I run.”
“Run? No! Seth, don’t even do this to me.”
“Just take the rope and run toward the market and don’t stop until you get to the woods behind it.”
“Oh my God Seth don’t do—”
He kissed her once more, then stood up and ran out toward the parking lot.
Amanita shrieked: “Seth!”
But her voice was merely the trumpet summoning him to battle. It was better this way, he thought, as he ran into the bright sunlight, perfect cotton clouds lazing in the sky as if painted there by a cartoonist. It was better to know he was dying for something real, not made of pixels and computer code. It was better to know that when he saw Jo again, she would forgive him, would understand his six-year-old fear and his teenage redemption.
It was better for Amanita to live, because for the first time since his little sister’s disappearance, he finally remembered what it felt like to live for someone else. And Amanita, for better or worse, deserved that.
The hissers rushed him, coming at him from every angle like an explosion played in reverse. He was a magnet and they were slivers of metal drawn in.
He fell to his knees.
The first hand gripped his left ear and ripped it off in a gout of blood. His lips tore from his face under blood-crusted fingernails. Teeth sank into his eyes and popped his vision. His nose was bitten off as more teeth worked into the top of his head. Somewhere there was screaming, and somewhere he knew his legs and arms were flailing, but inside his mind, there was only Jo and Am.
Ten seconds later, his head separated from his neck and he was with his sister once again.
Sunday, 10:21am
In the daylight it was easier to see what the wing of the plane had done to the trees around the fort. A wide path had been cut, like a reverse Mohawk in the woods. Everything that had stood in the way was now destroyed. Felled trees lay in random Xs over one another, dead birds lay broken in the debris, leaves and pine needles blanketed the ground like some kind of funeral shroud. The wing was still embedded in a tree a good hundred feet beyond the fort. Piles of embers crackled on the ground, only contained by patches of dirt and the morning’s dampness.
Connor maneuvered his way over the logs and stumps and stared at the remains of the fort that had been a Castor institution for so many years. It felt like his childhood lay on the forest floor, broken, ruined, ready for Mother Nature to erase it from the earth.
From up here on the hill, he and Nicole had a good view over the entire town. The park before them was bright green, tire tracks running through the middle of the fields. The plane crash was still swarming with undead. The houses nearby, where Jason and Maynard Drake had gathered their classmates, were nothing but kindling. The nose of the plane had made short order of anything in its path. The streets were stagnant, cars sitting abandoned where their owners had fled them in panic or been yanked from them in terror. On the side streets, hissers ran about like remote-controlled toys being steered by infants. They scurried over parked cars, zoomed around trees, sprinted down the middle of the road wailing for blood. They were indifferent to one another, only moving out of each other’s way lest it should impede their search.
“I can’t believe this,” Nicole said. “Of all the towns in the world for that plane to crash in…”
“If I did believe in God I’d sure as hell wonder what His plan for us was.”
Nicole held up the two USB drives. “I think we’re supposed to move the rock away from the tomb.”
He didn’t want to look at the scene below anymore, didn’t want to pretend that he couldn’t see his house from here. The house where his father had tried to save him and where he’d killed his mother, even though he knew she wasn’t his mother anymore, by that time.
The view of Castor was a cheap painting of hell.
“C’mon,” he waved her toward the riverbed. “Let’s find a tree to tie the rope to when Seth gets back.”
“If they get back.”
“Don’t think like that. Seth knows how to survive situations like this. It’s a matter of preempting your opponent. You should see him play Call of Duty…he’s a machine.”
They moved through the woods until they reached the edge of the cliff overlooking the dried-up Jefferson River. The wind howled up the ravine like a heaving breath.
“This tree will work,” Connor said, rubbing the bark of a slanted evergreen. He wrapped his arm around it, leaned out over the rock face and looked down, and figured it about sixty yards to the bottom. Hopefully Seth had found a good, long rope.
How they would get up the other side would be another matter all together, but he’d worry about that when the time came.
The howling in the river gorge grew louder. Funny how the wind sweeps through it down there, but I barely feel it up here, he thought.
Any further thought was cut off by footsteps, and he turned to give his best friend a hug.
Amanita walked up carrying two ropes, her shirt torn, her face awash in dirt. She dropped the ropes to the ground and sat on her feet, staring off into the distance.
“Oh my God, Am!” Nicole threw her arms around her friend and was practically crying.
Connor sat down next to her, saw blood on her face. “Where’s Seth?”
Amanita didn’t say anything, and Connor felt his stomach drop to his ankles.
What had happened to Seth was written in the girl’s eyes.
“Tell me it was fast,” Connor pleaded. Tears were running down his cheeks now as well. He had never cried so much as he had this last weekend. Maybe it would be enough crying to last him the rest of his life. It was pretty useless when you thought about it, tears did not bring back the dead, they did not undo God’s errors, they did not turn back time.
If they did, he would have gone back and joined his father at the front door of the house and avoided the incredible pain and loss that now filled his heart.
“He left me,” Amanita finally said, her voice just a whisper. “I asked him not to, but he did. And now he’s dead and it’s all my fault.”
“It’s not your fault, Am,” Nicole said, brushing sweaty strands of hair out of her friend’s face. “None of this is your fault or my fault or Connor’s or Seth’s. And we have these—” she showed her friend the flash drives “—to prove it.”
“But, he just left me. He kissed me and told me to run and then…they just tore him apart.”
Connor turned away, fighting the images that rose in his mind’s eye. He didn’t want to think of Seth that way, he wanted to think of the best friend who’d ridden bikes with him and played video games on lazy Saturday afternoons.
“You’ve got to get up, Am,” Nicole said, helping her friend to her feet. You’ve got to help us tie this rope and get across the gorge, before they start the bombing and t
he fires.”
Connor took Amanita’s hand and held it tight. “Am, if Seth saved you he sure as shit didn’t want us to get killed here, and he was my best friend so don’t think I’m not as upset as you, but we’ve only got a few minutes left. We still have to get up the other side and then get through those woods before they start. Can you stand up?”
Amanita’s eyes suddenly cleared, as though she snapped back from another world. She looked him in the eye and leaned in close to his ear. Her hot breath was quavering, and he was almost afraid of what she might say in her current state. But what she said not only let him know she was coming out of her shock, but made him smile.
“Yeah, I know,” he replied, “Seth was always a fifty in my book.”
Sunday, 10:25am
Connor tied the rope around the tree jutting out over the ravine. He dropped the loose end down and watched it unravel as it fell. End over end until it was completely unwound. The tip swung a few feet above the dry riverbed, so they’d have to jump down at the end but they wouldn’t hurt themselves.
“I don’t think I have enough muscles to do this,” Nicole said.
Connor took up the rope and wrapped it around one leg, held the rest up in front of him. “Like this, see? You put one foot on top of the other, clamping the rope in between. They didn’t make you do this in gym class?”
“They made us play volleyball,” Amanita said. “Any gym teacher who makes a girl climb a rope is in for a class full of little bitches.”
“And it ruins your nail polish,” Nicole added.
“Well, trust me,” Connor said, “this method works. Nicole you go first. I’ll lower you down. Then you go, Am, and I’ll follow up.”
“Maybe we should have just tried to get across the bridge?” Nicole looked out over the rock face, grimaced at the height.
“You heard what they said. They’re shooting anyone who gets close to it.”
“Pretty un-American, if you ask me.”
Hissers Page 23