She swallowed and it looked like she was going to say something. But before she could, Dave slid up underneath the awning in the truck, rolled down his window, and said, “Well, what are you waiting for? Get the fuck in!”
Be prepared for all contingencies. Especially zombies, liars, and highway traffic.
As we pulled away from the town and back onto the highway east, the truck was filled with uncomfortable silence. I sat in the front next to Dave, but I could feel Nicole staring daggers into my back. Even McCray shifted around, staring out the window between quick glances at me, then Dave, then me again.
“Seriously, no one has anything to say about what I just did?” Dave finally asked as he glanced in the rearview mirror at our new friends. “I mean, I just about walked on zombie water, people.”
No one said a word, but he didn’t seem to care. He slammed his palms on the steering wheel with a hoot of pride and amazement.
“I got to a truck through at least a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty of them without getting eaten alive. Surely someone wants to pat me on the back.”
He was greeted with more silence, this time silence he seemed to notice, and he frowned.
“Um, thanks Dave!” he said, making his voice high pitched the way he did when he was teasing me. “You were awesome Dave.” Now he switched to a British accent and dropped his voice lower like he was pretending to be McCray. “Good show, mate. Thanks for saving our asses.”
“Great job, babe,” I managed to croak out since that seemed to be what he wanted. I just had my mind on other things at the moment.
He looked at me very briefly (we were on the highway, remember, so you kind of had to go with brief to avoid wrecks and zombies).
“Okay, what the hell is going on?” he snapped. “You three are acting bizarre. You’ve hardly talked since you all jumped into the truck and that was like fifteen, twenty minutes ago. Did something happen while you were getting from the house to the church?”
More silence. I really didn’t want to tell him that I’d spilled my guts about our cure. I wasn’t sure how he’d take it. I mean, these were decisions we were supposed to discuss together, I was always saying that, reminding him (sometimes none-too-gently) about that. And yet I was the one who had broken that trust. Big time.
Suddenly, Dave hit the brakes and the truck squealed to a stop in the middle of the road. He threw it in Park and then half-turned so he could see all of us.
“Was someone bitten?” he asked quietly.
I blinked. Shit, of course that’s what he would assume when we were all being weird.
“No,” I whispered.
“Sarah—” he said, his voice drawn into a warning.
“I promise, no one was bitten.”
“Though if they were, it sounds like it wouldn’t be a big fucking deal,” Nicole said. She leaned back in her seat and folded her arms. “Being that you have a supercure or whatever on you.”
Dave’s eyes went wide and he slowly looked at me. “They know?”
I nodded once and then looked away. “Sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean for it to come out.”
“I should have known,” Nicole muttered. “You two are like goddamn folk heroes—”
“Wait,” Dave said and he faced her more squarely. “Folk heroes? I thought you didn’t know who we were when we found you.”
Now it was Nicole’s face that went pale and she looked at me with guilt in her gaze. “Um, yeah. About that…”
I sat up straighter, my own feelings of being an asshole fading in the face of her apparent lies. “Shit, you knew who we were?”
After a hesitation, she nodded. “Yeah.”
“What?” Dave said in blank disbelief.
Nicole shifted. “Well, I mean I’d heard about you and the extermination business you had in Phoenix. It was the talk in camps all over the Southwest, so pretty much the second I popped up over the border back into the U.S., I couldn’t ignore it. It was a huge story in the making.”
“So you came looking for us?” I asked as I shook my head in disbelief.
She nodded. “I kind of had to. People were saying you’d just packed up one day and disappeared without any explanation, but that it was like you had something to do. At that point, I knew there was a story there so, yeah. I-I set up meeting you, hoping you would take me along with you and I could figure out what it was.”
I stared at her. “But when we met you, you were getting chased by zombies. You’d had a motorcycle wreck, you had road rash… all that shit…”
She shrugged. “Yeah. All a set-up. Except for the road rash. I didn’t mean to get hurt quite that badly.”
“You little con artist,” McCray said with a wide grin on his face like this made her more interesting to him rather than more repugnant. “I knew I liked you even if you were a reporter strumpet.”
She glared at him, apparently unimpressed by his “compliment.”
“Well, now you know what you tricked us into finding,” I said with a shake of my head. “You got your story, Nicole. Dave is sort of… zombie benefits without zombie disadvantages and we have a sample of the cure that made him that way. Bravo, I’m sure a Pulitzer isn’t far behind. Oh wait, do they still give those out since the fucking world pretty much blew up?”
She flinched and at least she had the decency to look embarrassed. “Yeah, I probably should have told you I knew who you were, but I didn’t think you’d let me come with you if I did.”
Dave shrugged as he sent me a side-glance. “Well, that may be true.”
“No,” I protested. “No, no, no. There’s no way I’m going to be made to feel like Nicole’s lies are my fault somehow. We wouldn’t have just left her there by the side of the road even if she said straight out what her motives were. We’re not that awful.” I glared at her. “Though I’m starting to think we should be.”
“Oh, like you two don’t have secrets out the ass!” Nicole said with a huff of breath. “David gotten bitten by a zombie and is all superpowers now, but you let me ride around with you for days before you brought that up. What if he’d flipped and gone all zombie on me?”
“Come on, that’s not going to happen!” I snapped.
She shook her head. “You don’t know that. Plus you have a cure around your neck that you never mentioned even after you knew me pretty well.”
“It’s my cure, why should I tell you?”
She folded her arms. “What if something had happened to you on the way to the church and we needed that cure? I wouldn’t have known and neither would McCray. So somebody could have died or gone zombie and we could have stopped it except we didn’t know.”
I blinked. I guess I had no answer for that. Even if I wanted to pretend she didn’t, she had a point. It wasn’t like we’d told anyone about the cure since we had it, but Nicole wasn’t exactly just anyone. We’d never ridden with anyone else we’d come in contact with over the past month, or been in a position to help if they needed it. I could see how she might be irritated by that and that we hadn’t mentioned the “Dave bitten by a zombie” thing since that could have resulted in her eminent death and dismemberment.
Dave sighed. “Clearly, we all have our issues. But I think we should find a way to forgive each other, being that it’s the apocalypse and all. If there’s a time to go a little nutbar, this is it.”
I looked at him from the corner of my eye. He was going to be the bigger man, the grown-up. It was time to follow that lead. “Are all the secrets out on the table at this point?” I asked. “Just so we can all be honest from this point forward.”
There was a brief moment of silence and then McCray slowly raised his hand like we were in elementary school. Dave shook his head.
“You don’t have to wait for permission, just tell us what we need to know.”
“I accidentally banged my cousin after a show in Liverpool eight years ago,” McCray piped up. All of us looked at him and he shrugged. “I was pretty drunk at the time. Didn’t k
now she was related until the next morning.”
Dave opened and shut his mouth a few times, almost like he didn’t really know how to respond to that interesting admission (and who could blame him) but then he nodded. “Great. Glad you felt comfortable enough to finally share that, McCray. I’m sure that knowledge will come in handy in the future. So are all the secrets out on the table now?”
I nodded. McCray gave a sigh filled with relief and shrugged. Only Nicole sat stoic.
“What?” I asked, feeling a strong urge to toss her out on the side of the road like I’d claimed we wouldn’t have done before.
“I want to see it,” she said softly.
“What?” I asked. “McCray’s cousin?”
She narrowed her eyes. “No. The cure. I want to see the cure.”
Dave and I exchanged a quick glance. I hadn’t let anyone see or touch the vial besides him from the moment we obtained it back in the lab. My throat constricted just at the thought. But he nodded slowly. I glanced at Nicole. She didn’t look like she was going to back down from this request.
And maybe she shouldn’t. I wouldn’t have.
I reached under the neckline of my T-shirt and gently tugged the vial over it. Against the shirt’s black background, iridescent purple sparkled in the fading afternoon sunlight that filtered through the truck window behind me.
“Wow, that’s it?” Nicole whispered. Both she and McCray leaned forward to look at it. She even picked up the vial and rolled it between her fingers.
I fought the urge to snap it away from her, but nodded.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I injected David with the same stuff after he was bitten. It’s the cure.”
“My third album cover was the same color,” McCray mused before he lost interest and flopped back against the seat.
Nicole let go of the vial with a semi-contented sigh. “To think, all that power in one tiny container.”
I nodded. “So are we good? Did you get a good enough look?”
Nicole nodded and I flopped the vial back under my shirt. Funny, the fabric really provided no security, but I still breathed easier when it wasn’t out for the world to see.
“Great, so that’s all settled.” Dave glanced at me. “There’s just one more thing for us to discuss.”
“You two are really the president and first lady of the United States,” McCray offered.
“No.” Dave shook his head. “Sarah and I are still going to the Midwest Wall. It’s our best possible chance to getting this cure to people who might be able to use it to help the survivors in the Badlands.”
Nicole nodded. “Yeah, I figured as much.”
McCray just stared out the window. I looked at the two of them and when I cast David a side-glance, I could tell we were thinking the same thing.
“Look, now that all the cards are on the table and you know what we’re doing and why… if you want to come, you’re welcome to tag along,” I said. I couldn’t believe the words were coming from my mouth, but there they were. “Or we can find you another vehicle and you’re welcome to go your own way. We’d understand either decision, you just need to tell us.”
There was a long silence and then McCray shrugged. “Yeah, I’ll go with you. Why not? I’ve always sold well in Chicago-land.”
I smiled despite myself. Even if he was a major irritant, I was happy to know McCray wouldn’t be killing himself in Oklahoma any time soon.
Nicole nodded, too. “Yeah, I’m in. This is the story of the century, I can’t bail now.”
Relief worked its way through me. I might not have warm fuzzies about either of these two morons, but the more, the merrier at this point. There was safety in having extra hands to fire extra guns.
“But,” Nicole added and my heart sank again. “If you really have the cure, I don’t think we can meander our way to the Wall like we’re on a school field trip.”
“Hey, I wouldn’t call it meandering,” Dave said with a frown.
Nicole shook her head. “It took you a month to get to the point where you found me. Long enough for me to suspect you two had an angle, formulate a plan, and ambush you with my damsel-in-distress routine. That’s meandering.”
Dave pursed his lips, but didn’t argue with her again.
“So maybe we meandered a little,” I admitted. “What do you want to do about it?”
“I think we have to get there and get there now, before something happens to the cure and we lose any chance of getting it into the right hands.” She shook her head. “That means no more thirty-miles-a-day driving and shit.”
“And how do you propose we do more than that?” I asked. “We’re not exactly in optimal driving conditions.”
Dave stared at the deserted road. “We’d have to stay on the highway,” he mused.
I shook my head as I thought of all the trouble we’d found on the highway. “No, no—”
“I know you don’t like that,” he said as he grabbed my hand. “But it is the fastest and most direct route. Half of our slowdowns have been because of the roads we’ve been traveling since we started east.”
“And there are four of us,” Nicole added. “Which means lots of people to clear wrecks or butcher zombies if we need to do that. And we should also drive in shifts.”
“You mean drive at night?” I burst out. Yup, my chest was closing. No air. Death immediate.
“Yes,” Nicole said with a short, military-like nod. “We’ll have to be slow and careful when it’s dark, of course. Two people awake. One driver, one lookout.”
“Oh yeah, that will make it better,” I wheezed as I fought for breath.
“I think the past few days have proved that stopping to camp every day is just as dangerous,” Dave said, his tone gentle like he knew I needed more reassurance than even he could give. “Every time we stop, we have to clear places, find food, deal with hostile survivors.”
“But it’s over six hundred fifty miles to Normal right now,” I insisted, even though I could see I was about to be outvoted. But I’d never been one to give up without a fight, hence why I was still alive.
“So? That’s like ten hours of driving!” Nicole said.
“If we could average above sixty and never stop for gas or to pee,” I snorted. “You think that’s going to happen on Interstate Zombie? Really?”
Dave sighed. “Okay, you’re right. But we could probably average thirty even with stops and unforeseen circumstances. That would be…”
We all hesitated, doing math in our heads.
“Less than twenty-four hours,” McCray piped up from the back.
All of us stared and he shifted with a bit of discomfort.
“What? I went to school, too, you know,” he muttered.
“It’s like he’s Rainman,” Nicole muttered. “But he is right. So what do you think?”
I stared at her. The girl already looked like she’d won, which was superannoying. McCray wasn’t really paying attention. Finally, I looked at Dave. He was waiting for me. But I think we all knew what I’d have to say. They hadn’t really given me much choice, being all reasonable and everything.
“Fine,” I said as I rubbed my eyes.
Nicole let out a whoop and grabbed for the atlas that was on the console between Dave and me. “I’ll start charting the best course and our switch and gas points.”
I turned around in my seat as Dave put the truck in gear and we started rolling again.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “You ready for this?”
I laughed, though at the moment I was feeling more nervous than amused. “Well, ready or not, here we come.”
Pay attention to nonverbal communication. People almost always signal in some way before they try to kill you.
Getting to the outskirts of Normal, Illinois, took a little longer than twenty-four hours. McCray refused to sleep (or maybe he couldn’t), so that left three drivers to trade shifts rather than four, which meant a bit more switching and figuring out rest schedules. But about thirty hours a
nd three zombie fights later, we did roll up a low hill on Interstate 55 and came to a slow stop right before the Main Street Exit.
Main Street, Normal, Illinois.
Could you get any more Norman Rockwellian? All we needed was a kid to come by tossing a ball to his dog and we’d be set. Of course at this point, the kid would be a zombie and he’d be tossing a human hand to a demon mutt or something.
“Well, here we are,” Dave whispered, even though we were in the car with our windows rolled up. But there was something about this situation that screamed reverence. After all, we were about to finally find out if the rumors of the Midwest Wall were true.
And if they weren’t, I had no clue what we’d do. Keep heading east, I guess, until we ran out of real estate and hit the Atlantic Ocean.
But I wasn’t looking forward to that, partly because it would be a long, grueling trip. If McCray and Nicole came along, I’d have to spend some portion of it listening to them fight in the backseat and resisting the urge to tell them, “If you don’t stop that, I’ll turn this car around.”
I’d totally turn into my mother before a week was up.
But more importantly, I needed there to be a Midwest Wall. If there wasn’t, it would pretty much guarantee that my entire family was dead. My dad had been heading this way last I heard from him (which was, admittedly, about five seconds after the attack) and my mom had lived in Normal for the last five years. I didn’t see her as the running-for-cover type. Even if the zombies came to her door. In fact, she might make them coffee just because she was so polite.
Yeah, I know, I hadn’t exactly inherited that trait. We all have our failings.
In the backseat, Nicole was loading shells into a shotgun we’d found at a gas station along the route. McCray was next to her, sharpening the blade of a machete with enough careful precision that I figured he’d done it before. Sometimes I wondered how much of his “drunken rock star” thing was an act and how much was real. At this point, I didn’t have the answer.
“Now I heard the Wall should be right over the bluff of the freeway,” Dave said while he pocketed shells and checked his own weapon. “So we’ll need to take a peek over the overpass and just get our bearings.”
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