The tuck coughed once, twice, then the engine caught, and Doug hit the accelerator, tearing over bodies.
She couldn’t help but look out the back window as they drove off. Her father stooped in the middle of the road, his burnt face twisted in rage. He walked off into an alley with the other hissers, attracted now to something else. If it was a person should they go back? What if it was her mom? She hadn’t seen her mom in the dead bodies or walking down the road.
“Snap out of it, Am” Doug said. “I heard what you called that thing, but you know in your heart that wasn’t really your dad. I’m sorry.”
She stared out the front window and said nothing. There were no words worth saying right now.
Doug rubbed his back. “Threw my back out picking you up, girl. That’s two you owe me.”
TUESDAY, 5:14 PM
Abandoned cars lined the middle of the highway, doors open, windshields stained in blood, steering wheels punctuated with crimson handprints, trunks and hoods dented from people having run over them. The occasional dead body lay motionless amongst them all, hair and clothes whipping in the breeze. Olive steered the truck slowly but surely around the mess, avoiding running over corpses, and tried to stay on the road, heading west. “Jesus, it’s like driving through a war zone.”
“It’s spreading,” Connor said. “It’s already been here. All these people…just dead.”
They passed an overturned military Humvee, saw nothing but blood around it.
“Been here and moved on,” Olive agreed. “Keep an eye on the corpses on the ground. No telling if they’re gonna pop up and give chase. Have that gun ready just in case.”
Where was the rest of military, Connor wondered. Had that Humvee been sent here or was it just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Did the bigwigs even know about the hissers making it this far? They must, he thought. They have satellites and stuff, they had to know this area was lost. Which meant the military was probably overwhelmed, maybe even out of commission. On its back like the Humvee. But then he’d already suspected that would be the case.
“Where are we going to get gas if these things are out here?” he asked.
Olive brushed her bangs out of her face. “Hell if I know. We only got a few miles left on what’s in the truck here. Gas light’s been on for twenty minutes now. We should be passing a town soon, though, right?.”
“What about these cars? They probably have more gas than us. Looks like this was just people driving away from the chaos. We could swap.”
“You’re saying I should give up my truck? No way. This is my baby.”
“I’m just saying I don’t feel like walking to San Diego. Besides, look, that’s a charger right there. Those things haul ass. At least that’s what I hear.”
Just then the truck bucked, coughed, and picked up again. “Shit,” Olive said, “we don’t even have the few miles I thought we had. Sonofabitch.”
“Olive, please, I don’t want to get stuck out here in the open. There’s nothing but woods and fields and that farm house over there which is probably full of those dead things.”
With a sigh, Olive braked and put the truck in park. She turned off the engine and leaned her head against the steering wheel. “I think my mom has alzheimers, you know that? More and more I talked to her on the phone lately the more and more she was just a confused ball of mess.”
Connor didn’t know where this was coming from, didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry. We’ll get to her. Don’t worry. But it’ll be easier if we have a faster car.”
“What do I do if I get there and she’s dead, kid? I don’t think I can go on.”
“I don’t know. I still can’t believe my mom and dad are dead, but I just know I can’t stop moving. I gotta believe now that the thing that chased me down my road, that I ran over, wasn’t really my mom. I mean, I believe… My mom and dad died saving me, died loving me. I know that in my heart. What they became wasn’t really them. So, like, if your mom is…gone…or just forgetting things…you gotta remember she loved you before she changed.”
Olive lifted her head, stared at Connor. “You’re pretty grown up for a kid, you know that?”
“I don’t feel grown up. I just feel…sad. Angry. Something.”
“C’mon, let’s grab that Charger. Move slow, stay low, keep your eyes open. They could be anywhere.”
Slowly, Connor opened the door to the truck and stepped out onto the highway, the backpack Olive gave him slung over his shoulder, the flash drive now sealed in a Ziplock bag inside his pocket. It was hot out and heatwave rippled on the horizon. There was no noise except the skittering of insects in the thicket lining the road. He strained his ears for the sound of hissers but heard nothing. The Charger was a few cars up, slewed sideways across the double yellow lines. Its doors were closed and its windows were tinted. Olive came around the front of the truck, her own backpack over her shoulder and her gun in hand. With a wave, she motioned him to follow.
Ducking low, Connor took a step over small cubes of broken windshield glass. They crunched preternaturally loud in the absence of other noise. Somewhere in the woods to his right he could hear birds chirp at the sound, but they fell silent again and all he heard was the wind rushing through the tall grasses.
“Watch out for this body.” A car ahead, Olive stepped over a headless corpse.
Connor moved past the broken glass, stepped over the body as well, spun around to check his perimeter. There was no one coming, but he kept his gun raised nevertheless. Step, turn, look, step, turn, look. He made it a rhythm, a dance almost. A handful more dead bodies lay in their way, but none of them stirred. He was getting used to seeing the bloodshed, the disgusting biological fragility of it all. The only corpse that made him wince was a teenage girl missing half of her face. She looked a little like Nicole.
When they reached the Charger, Olive put her face to the driver’s side window and peered in through the tint. Instantly the car shook and a ruined bloody face smacked against the inside of the glass. “Shit!” Olive screamed, backing up.
Connor raised his gun, cocked the hammer, aimed it at the car door. Inside, the hisser struggled to get out but for some reason couldn’t get the door open. Its roar of hunger came through the car loud and clear as it struggled for freedom.
“Must have broken the handle inside,” Olive said, shaking. “Or it’s a power lock.”
“Or he forgot how to open a door. Let’s just shoot him.” He pressed closer.
“No, don’t shoot it,” Olive said, catching her breath. “Not yet. You’ll put a hole in the window. We’ll need the window.”
“I’m thinking we find another car then.”
“No. This one is the fastest around. Let’s open it up, check the gas gauge first, see if the keys are in there…or on that thing.”
“You want to let it out?”
“Don’t give it a chance to get out. I’ll open the door and you shoot it. Can you do that?”
Connor remembered the two zombies he’d shot on the side of the road back in Castor, the first two he’d encountered after grabbing General Davis’s gun. He remembered the cold feeling that had washed over him when he saw their heads split open. He’d done it a thousand times in video games but doing it that night in real life had changed him. He’d come to terms with death and survival, and with the fact these things weren’t human. It wasn’t until he’d emptied the gun into more hissers at the plane that he’d let the feeling of murder, for want of a better term, settle into his bones. Okay, it wasn’t murder per se, but it was ending something’s life, even if that thing was borne from hell. “Yeah, I can do that. Just like Halo.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing. Just a game. Something Seth and I used to play.” He raised the gun in front of him, parted his legs to get a good stance. “I’m ready.”
“Okay, on three.” She grabbed the door handle, gave him a nod. The hisser slammed its head against the window again, leaving a smear of blood on the inside. �
��Be quick, and don’t shoot the steering column. Ready? One…two…three!”
She pulled the door open. The hisser leapt out with the force of a charging bull, throwing the door wide and knocking Olive to the ground where she lost hold of her weapon. Connor took the shot, saw the hisser’s face explode in a red blossom as its body slammed into him, taking him to the ground under its weight. Its mangled head snapped forward and head butted him, erupting stars behind his eyes.
“Connor! Get up!” Olive shouted. “Get up now!”
With aching limbs, Connor rolled the dead hisser off him, stood up only to see two small children, little girls no older than eight or nine, racing out of the back of the Charger. Both wore matching pink dresses with sparrows on them, bows in their hair. The first was on Olive before she could grab her gun. The second came right at Connor.
“Twins,” he muttered. The small girl roared and leapt at him. He swung his gun at her and hit her in the face, knocked her sideways. As she righted herself, he fired. The small dead girl’s head snapped back, the back of her skull clacking to the road, one eye falling out onto her chest. She landed on her back and lay still.
“Bitch!” Olive yelled, desperately trying to keep her attacker’s fingernails from getting her eyes. She kicked out and sent the little girl backwards into the car. With a sweep of her legs, she pulled her gun toward her, snatched it up and fired. The bullet passed through the girl’s neck and into the car’s seat. She fired again, this time blasting a hole in the girl’s nose. The body dropped in a heap and went still.
“You gotta get the brain,” Connor said, offering a hand to help her up. She took it, brushed herself off when she was upright.
“I can see that,” she said. “Now I know why I never had kids.” She used her foot to shove the dead girl aside and took a deep breath.
“You okay?” Connor asked.
“Didn’t think I’d be shooting kids is all. Oh man, I don’t want to do that again.” She looked inside the Charger. “Keys are in the ignition, tank is half full. That’s good.”
“Guy must have gotten bit in the car somehow,” Connor offered. “Or got bit and jumped in the car with his kids before he turned.”
“Look here. The backseat is torn through. I think one of them things got into the trunk somehow, clawed its way into the backseat.”
Connor moved to the car’s trunk, saw that indeed it was not fully shut. He raised his gun, backed up, and used his foot to kick it open. It was empty. “Came back out the way it went in, I guess,” he said. But where was it now, he wondered. Where were any of the things that had attacked the people in this caravan.
“Fucker had a bottle of Jack in here,” Olive said, holding up the liquor. “It’s still full. He may not have been Dad of the Year but I’m liking him now.” She undid the cap and took a long swig. “Oh God, that’s good. You want some.”
“I don’t really drink.”
“I don’t think the laws apply anymore, kid. But it’s your choice. I’m certainly not going to corrupt a minor. It’s an acquired taste anyway.”
“I tried it once. Not long again fact. I don’t get why people drink it. It doesn’t even taste good.”
“People don’t drink it for the taste of the liquor, Connor. They drink it because it tastes better than the sewage that is their life. C’mon, throw the supplies in here and let’s get going. The sun is going down soon. We’re going to need to find shelter and maybe see if we can find a way to get news on what’s happening.”
“How are we going to do that? There’s no Internet, no cellphones, nothing.”
“There’s no electronics, true, but there’s still campfires, and people tell stories around campfires. And all the people from these cars can’t be dead. Some of them must have gotten away, which means they’re around here somewhere. All we have to do is find them, or find wherever people are hiding, and we can get some news. I find it hard to believe every police station and firehouse is empty. People have to be somewhere.”
“But what if there isn’t? What if everyone’s just dead?”
Olive got in the car and started up the engine. It purred to life without a problem. From the passenger seat she grabbed a Girl Scouts sweatshirt and wiped away the dead man’s blood from the inside of the window, then tossed it on the road. “Then we carry on. Because I know my mom is dead, I’m gonna get to her. And we’re gonna get that drive to your destination. And get in the damn car already because I’m looking in the rearview mirror and I see movement behind us and I don’t think it’s the highway welcoming committee come to ask us to adopt this section.”
Connor turned and saw the mirage in the distance. A wavy line of dirt being kicked in the air. And in that mirage he saw the clear silhouettes of hundreds of moving limbs attached to bulbous monstrosities. The spider creatures were coming.
He threw his supplies in the back seat of the Charger and jumped in the passenger seat. It was still covered in blood but at this point he had to assume getting blood on himself superficially wasn’t a method of transmittal. Olive threw the car in gear and eased it out of the traffic jam, being careful not to hit the cars around them. “No use getting bumpers locked,” she said.
Connor picked up the Jack Daniels and stared at the brown liquid. Just holding it reminded him of Nicole, and that night in the fort, how he’d felt her breath on his mouth after trying the booze. “How long does it take to develop a taste for this?” he asked as Olive got the car free and kicked it into high gear.
She drove on the berm, moving as fast as she could without causing the car to slide. “Your parents were killed by undead monsters,” she said. “If you don’t have a taste for it now, you never will.”
TUESDAY, 9:12 PM
The pantry was full of canned food, but none of it looked appealing to Amanita. What she really wanted was a grilled chicken salad, not creamed corn and refried beans. She shut the door and returned to the living room where Doug sat in a beige couch by the front door, a baseball bat in his hand. He was pretending to play it like a guitar.
“Find anything to eat?” he asked.
“No. I mean, there’s a couple Hot Pockets in the freezer, but the freezer is off so they’re pretty much room temperature. We can risk it, I suppose, can cook ’em over a fire. You think they’re full of preservatives and shit?”
“I don’t think making a fire is a good idea. We don’t want to draw attention.”
“I think if no one saw us breaking in here, making all that noise with the back door, then there probably aren’t any people around. At least not anyone who cares.”
“You could be right. Then again, maybe people are just holed up in the homes ’round here, keeping a low profile. Still, I say no fire.”
Amanita plopped in a recliner opposite the couch. “So then what? We stay here for a while, eat bugs?”
“Funny.”
“I don’t think it’s safe. I’ve been trapped in a house when those things broke in. Doors and windows don’t stop them, they just break through. And then you’re kind of trapped.”
“We’ll leave in the morning, find someplace better, see if we can meet up with the army. They’ve got to have safety zones set up somewhere.”
“I dunno. This place is like a ghost town. I haven’t even seen signs of a firefight let alone any military cars.” She drew her knees up to her chest and hung her head, breathed heavily to calm her nerves.
“How you doing?” Doug asked.
“Fucking dandy.”
“I’m sorry again about your parents.”
“I know. You already told me. Doesn’t bring them back, though.”
Doug sneaked a peek out the curtains to the street. He turned back to Amanita. “I lost people too, you know. My best friends. All of ’em just killed before me. It was messed up, I tell ya.”
“Them hissing dead things got them?”
“Yeah. We were gigging when it happened, at The Calendar Bar.”
“Never heard of it.”
&nbs
p; “It’s north of Liptonville. Small little joint, but they have some great whiskey. We were halfway through a version of Walk the Line—”
“Is that a song?”
“Is that a song? You’re kidding me. Only the best Johnny Cash song ever written.”
Amanita shook her head. “Still not entirely sure who that is? I mean, I’ve heard the name and all. Wasn’t there a movie or something.”
“You’re cutting me deep, Am. Johnny Cash is the only musician you ever need know. He is American music personified.”
“Says you.”
“Then tell me, Am, who do you like to listen to?”
“Um. I like the Booya Brothers for hip hop. Or, um, I really like The Parasite Phantoms. They’re a punk band.”
“Girl, there hasn’t been a real punk band since Joe Strummer kicked Mick Jones out of the Clash.”
“Who?”
Doug slapped his hand on his forehead. “Okay, we’re gonna have to set aside some time for Music 101 later, but for now just take it from me we were killing it on Walk the Line when all of a sudden these crazy guys just come running in the front door of the bar and start biting people. And I’m on stage singing, and I’m watching this and thinking a fight has broken out, which isn’t too uncommon at a bar, but then wondering why a fight would break out to a love song, and then I just see blood everywhere. I mean everywhere.
“So we stop playing and look at each other, like, what do we do. And I see one of the bartenders get his throat ripped completely out. Blood goes all over the damn place. He falls down and he’s totally still. But then about five seconds later he’s up again and his eyes are just wrong, you know, like kind of yellow. Like dry stones. And he’s snarling and looking right at me. Next thing I know he’s running right for me, jumping over dead people on the ground, marking me for death.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I froze. I just see Kevin’s guitar—Kevin plays lead, kind of like Luther Perkins, and don’t ask me who that is because you’ll just make me cry—his guitar comes out of nowhere and smashes this dead guy’s face in. I see the guy’s nose crush into pulp. Must have jarred the brain, thankfully, because the guy went down and stayed down. But it was too late. More of them were coming. Kevin’s got his Telecaster up again and it’s dripping brain and blood and he swings again and this time I kind of snap out of my trance. I don’t remember a whole lot besides picking up my stage monitor and bringing it down on this chick’s head. She was climbing on stage and clawing for me. I’d been looking at her in the crowd earlier but she had those same yellow eyes now and some dude’s fingers in her mouth. I hit her so hard I saw bits of her brain shoot of of her ears. Our drummer, George, starts throwing his toms and doing his best to keep them things at bay. I saw him stab his drum stick right into some jughead’s eye, right into the brain, but it was too late. He went down under a pile of them things, swinging and kicking and doing damage that would knock out a real person, but not these things. And I look around and there’s Kevin under another pile. Our bass player—I don’t even know his real name—he’s punching and kicking but the dead fucks have got him, pulling him apart in a tug-o-war. Both his arms rip right off at the shoulder. Man, he screamed so loud I thought my ears would bleed.
Hissers II: Death March Page 5