“We could get stuck here,” Heather said. “If the road is blocked up ahead—”
“We’ll deal with that when it happens,” I told her.
We passed buildings that were leaning over, ready to collapse at the slightest provocation, their roofs tilted crazily like ocean waves ready to crest. We passed houses that had been cut in half, their insides laid open to view so we could even see the peeling wallpaper and the pink fluff of the insulation in their attics. Then we drove past the first crater. A big bowl-shaped depression in the earth, everything around it charred or twisted. Whatever had been there once was completely gone, obliterated.
“What did this?” Heather asked. “Tornadoes, you think?”
I’d seen a tornado swirling over Staten Island once, when I was young. It had looked like just a dark streak in the air. My parents, all the first-generation people of New York, had been terrified of it and of what it could do to Manhattan, but it had never come any closer, and eventually it just faded away. I looked back at Heather and shrugged. “Maybe? Or an earthquake.”
But that crater bothered me. Especially when I saw more of them. The closer we got to the heart of Trenton, the more common they became—great scoops taken out of the ground, holes where buildings should have been. The piles of debris got bigger and the intact buildings farther apart. This wasn’t a city anymore, it was a ruin.
We came to a place where a great notch had been cut through the city, a trench fifty yards wide as if a great knife had slashed across the face of the planet there. Nothing remained in the notch except rubble, most of it broken down to powdery dust. Kylie had to stop the SUV, and I jumped out to test that dust to see if we could even drive over it. I stomped on it with my foot and found that below a thin coating of dust the ground underneath was fused into slag. “It’s fine,” I called back, waving my arms, and Kylie crawled forward, the tires making horrible popping sounds as they crushed the dust under their wheels.
I jumped back inside the SUV. “This isn’t natural,” I said, just thinking out loud. “Somebody did this. Intentionally.”
“How?” Heather asked.
“I have no idea. It must have been—I don’t know. The army. This place was attacked.” It had to have happened during the crisis, I thought. I’d heard stories from the first generation of armies of zombies sweeping through the countryside, of millions of them shuffling forward, climbing over one another, clawing their way through fields and woods, eating anything they could get their hands on. The military had responded as best they could, with guns and bombs and tanks and everything they had. It hadn’t been enough. Maybe they’d decided that Trenton was expendable. Maybe they had blown it up rather than let the zombies have it. I didn’t know then, and I never found out the answer. I did know, at that moment, that the place was no good. I don’t believe in ghosts, but a place like that has to be haunted, if that only describes the effect it has on those who travel there. Something terrible, truly horrible, had happened to the city. Something that even the earth wanted to forget, a wound it tried to heal with grass and trees and flowering plants, but it was taking a long time.
On the far side of the notch the road was clear again for a ways, though up ahead my view was blocked by piles of rubble and partially intact buildings that seemed to lean over the asphalt. The devastation wasn’t as thorough up there, it seemed. It looked like one or two buildings were left that hadn’t been damaged at all.
We were just crawling along, moving no faster than I could run on my own legs. It was a good thing, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have seen the survivors of Trenton until it was too late.
CHAPTER 46
There,” I shouted, and I pointed before my brain had even registered what I’d seen. Just a flash of movement, a scrap of color against the dull neutrals of the rubble. A hint of facial features, of eyes watching us.
“What was it? A zombie?” Heather asked.
The girls all swarmed over to the right side of the car to look out their windows, their faces pressed to the glass. All of them except Kylie. Her eyes stayed on the road ahead. Her armor was up, her emotions locked tightly away. For once I was glad for it.
“I don’t think so,” I said. Those eyes I’d glimpsed hadn’t been red. Not that I’d gotten a particularly good look. I leaned up against the glass of my window, scanning the rubble for any sign of motion, any indication at all that I hadn’t just seen a bird, or a reflection off a broken piece of glass. It seemed impossible—horrible—that anyone could be living in Trenton, in that quietly desolate place.
Heather screamed, and we all turned to look, not at what she might have seen, but at her. It was a human enough instinct, but it served us poorly that time. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought—”
“Finnegan,” Kylie said. I swung around in my seat and looked straight ahead. A man had walked out of the ruins and was sauntering across the road just ahead of us. Kylie braked the SUV so we didn’t roll right into him.
He was not old, but hardly young. His face was covered by a thick and matted beard. His clothing was little more than a dull-colored smock, and he moved with a limp. His eyes were human—blue, not red—and full of hatred.
He walked right out in front of us, right into our path. The SUV was still creeping forward, but he didn’t seem to care if we ran him down. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do—whether we should try to talk to him or shoot him or what. I lifted one hand, but he ignored the gesture. Instead he picked up a rock and flung it at us. It smacked into the windshield with a noise like a gunshot, and a crack stretched through the glass.
Kylie stood on the brakes, stopping us altogether.
“Heather,” I said, “get the guns.”
“He’s not even armed,” Mary pointed out.
I shook my head. “Heather—”
The man in the road made some kind of obscene gesture. Then he loped off, back into the ruins, far faster than a man with a limp should have. A cold, uncertain feeling pierced my guts. I couldn’t remember being so scared before.
All around us, on either side of the road, shapes were moving now, human shapes, barely seen through broken windows and gaps in the buildings.
“Kylie, go,” I said.
She started to protest. “The road here is—”
“Just fucking go!”
She threw us into drive and we bounced and jumped over debris in the road. Up to this point the asphalt had been surprisingly clear—now it was littered with fist-sized chunks of broken concrete and tire-slashing lengths of rebar. I didn’t think that was accidental.
On our left side a girl no older than Addison came rushing out of a ruined building. She wore a scrap of cloth with a hole cut in it for her head, and nothing more. She was carrying three rocks, one of which she threw so it hit Kylie’s door. If anyone else had been driving, the noise the impact made might have scared the hell out of them and made them jump. Not Kylie. Not even when the second rock hit her window and left a deep pit in the glass.
Over on my side, two women who were all but naked came rushing up, iron bars brandished over their heads. Heather handed me a machine pistol over the back of my seat, and I pointed it at the women. They were brave, but clearly not foolhardy—as soon as they saw my weapon pointed at them they disappeared, dropping into a ditch on the side of the road.
Meanwhile three rocks hit the roof of the car, one two three, the third one leaving a dent we could all see. In the seat behind me, Mary and Addison were checking and loading pistols, but there was nothing for them to shoot. As soon as the Trentonites would appear and attack, they were gone again, too quick for us to get a bead on them.
“They’ve done this before,” I said. This was an ambush, a carefully crafted trap. The Trentonites had cleared the road this far and no farther, intending that we would come right to them.
Whether they wanted what was in
the SUV—the food and fuel we carried—or they wanted to eat us, or they just hated anyone who wasn’t a member of their tribe, I have no idea. But as Kylie pulled forward, inching her way through the scattered rubble on the asphalt, I saw we weren’t the first to fall into the trap.
Up ahead, filling the road, was a jam of cars and SUVs and motorcycles, all of them rusting and rotting in the sun. But none of them were so decomposed that they could have been there for more than a year or two.
Some of them still had skeletons in them. Skeletons that, to my heated imagination, looked scorched by fire or hacked to pieces with primitive axes.
“Kylie,” I said, wanting her to get us out of there, having no idea how. Because I didn’t see a way forward. The wrecked vehicles filled the road ahead, and piles of rubble blocked our way left and right.
Behind us human shapes flitted back and forth, never staying in one place long enough for us to fire on them. They hunkered down behind large rocks or slabs of concrete or vanished into empty window frames or down into ditches. This whole section of ruined city must have been catacombed with hiding places. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the Trentonites had dug out bolt-holes and communicating trenches just for this purpose.
I tried to think like they had. I tried to imagine myself setting up this trap, with the intention of finding a way out of it. It didn’t look like there was one. From what I saw, the Trentonites had reverted to barbarism and primitive behavior in the twenty years since the crisis, but that didn’t mean they’d gone stupid.
“Guns,” I said, thinking we would make a good stand, anyway. A good final stand. “Everybody arm yourselves. Don’t shoot until they’re close enough you’re sure you’ll hit something vital.”
The shapes behind us were getting closer. Rocks kept bouncing off the roof of the SUV. I think they were trying to make us panic. In my case, it was working.
“Kylie,” I said, “take this gun.” I held the machine pistol out to her.
She looked over at me with a question on her face. I had no time nor inclination at that moment to figure out what the question might be. She bit her lip, and still she hadn’t taken the gun from me.
“Kylie,” I said again.
“Everyone,” she said. She looked back at the other girls. “Put your seat belts on.”
CHAPTER 47
A wave of relief washed over me as I pulled my seat belt across my chest. Kylie must have seen something I’d missed. Free of the terror and hopelessness I felt, she had found some way out of the trap. As rocks hammered down on the SUV’s roof and sides, I turned to look at her and said, “Where? Where’s the way out?”
She threw the SUV in reverse, and we shot backward. I jerked forward in my seat belt and grabbed the dashboard, dropping the machine pistol, which landed painfully on my feet.
“So we’re going to back out through them?” I asked.
But Kylie had other ideas.
There were too many Trentonites back there, and most likely they had some way of keeping us from getting out the way we’d come. Kylie had figured that out without any help. So she took the one way open to us.
She put the SUV back into drive. Slamming her foot down on the accelerator, she hurtled forward, straight at the wall of burnt and trashed cars ahead of us. At the last possible moment she spun the wheel and we smashed right into the front end of a car that had already been crumpled out of recognition. The SUV came to a sudden stop, and my head banged against my window, cracking the glass.
“What the hell,” I had time to say.
Kylie threw the gearshift into reverse. She backed up as far as she could, then rammed forward again, this time sending the broken car spinning away from us.
Behind us a crowd of Trentonites were running toward us, lengths of rebar in their hands, howling for our blood. They had no problem showing themselves now—maybe they assumed we had lost our minds. I wasn’t sure if I disagreed. But Kylie had known what she was doing. There was a gap ahead of us, a narrow lane through the pile of destroyed cars. A way out, maybe.
“This might be loud,” Kylie said, and jammed us through that gap as fast as she could. The squeal of metal scraping metal was deafening, and I heard pieces of the SUV scream and then snap off. We slowed to a halt as our engine whined and smoke leaked from our hood. But Kylie never let off the accelerator.
Just as the first Trentonite reached the back of the SUV and started hammering on our rear window with a rock, we started to move again, inching our way forward. An iron bar broke through a side window and Addison screamed as someone grabbed her hair and started to pull her out of the SUV.
I drew my knife. I had no idea what I was doing—my body just took over—as I released my seat belt, then clambered up over the back of my seat and slashed again and again at the hand holding Addison’s hair. When the hand wouldn’t let go, I cut her hair instead.
And then the SUV shot forward and I was thrown into the backseat, into Mary’s and Heather’s laps. The scream of grinding metal stopped and we were free, moving forward, racing away from the trap.
Not that we were home free. The street ahead was full of rubble, half of an entire house having slid down to block the way. Kylie swung the wheel to one side, and I went sliding across the backseat, my head ending up down by Heather’s legs. I scrambled back up, grabbing onto the back of the driver’s seat, just in time to see Kylie take a chain-link fence at full speed. The fencing wrapped around the windshield, and I saw one of the steel uprights—a six-foot-long lance of metal as thick as my forearm—come spinning and shearing straight toward us. The windshield exploded in a cloud of shattered glass, and the upright slammed right through the passenger seat where I’d been sitting less than thirty seconds earlier. It impaled the vinyl seat cover and went right through the springs and everything else in the seat, its jagged edge poking through the seat back to come within inches of Addison’s face.
I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her closer to me, just in case the steel pole wasn’t done spearing through the SUV.
Ahead, through the empty place where the windshield had been, I looked to see if the road was clear—and saw there was no road. Beyond the fence lay a gravel shoulder and beyond that only railroad tracks and another fence. Kylie swung us up onto the tracks and the SUV bounced and I went flying, bouncing off the seat in front of me, off Heather’s face and chest. There was a noise like a gunshot going off right next to my ear. “What was that?” I asked.
“One of our tires exploded,” Kylie said, her voice as flat as our road was not.
We rattled and shook and bounced, but we were moving forward. Behind us a mob of Trentonites came running, some of them carrying lit torches now, but we were past them, we were free. The railroad tracks stretched ahead of us, clear as far as I could see, and though I was certain we were doing terrible damage to the SUV’s suspension, we were picking up speed.
The crowd behind us lost ground as we sped forward. And then the ruined buildings on either side fell away, and there was only blue sky around us as we hurtled across a railroad bridge.
Wind whipped through the SUV’s cabin. It was suddenly, surprisingly quiet, for all the noise the SUV made as it bounced over the railroad ties. I looked around, at all the girls, and saw they were still there. Still alive.
“Look,” Heather said, and pointed to her right, through the broken window.
The bridge we rode on ran parallel to another, a bridge meant for cars and motor traffic. If our way hadn’t been blocked, if we had just driven straight through Trenton, we would have been on that bridge.
And we would have been in serious danger. Half of that bridge had been sheared clean off, its steel girders twisted and red with rust at the break. Half the span had collapsed to fall down into the river below, where the water had slowly devoured it. If we had taken that bridge at speed, we could have ended up down there as well.
>
Like something out of a dream or a parable, a huge sign hung from the intact half of the bridge, a message written in letters ten feet high:
THE WORLD TAKES
I could only stare at it and wonder who had left that message and what they were trying to say.
Eventually we crossed the river, and Kylie got us off the railroad tracks. We got back onto good familiar asphalt, and she stopped the SUV. It shook and complained and took a long time for the engine to power down.
We were in Pennsylvania.
CHAPTER 48
The damage to the SUV was severe, but it still ran.
The main problem was the blown tire. We wouldn’t get very far riding on the rim, and I was worried we were going to have to go hunting for a replacement—or even worse, find someone to fix it for us. After Princeton, I knew we couldn’t approach any more looter camps in New Jersey. I had no idea what to expect if we ended up limping to one in Pennsylvania. It seemed fate was against us and we would never make it to Ohio—
—or at least, it seemed that way until Kylie pulled open a hidden compartment in the trunk and showed me the spare tire hidden back there.
“Adare thought of everything,” I said.
“Except one thing,” Kylie said, standing aside as I pulled the tire out of its hiding place. “Everybody forgets one thing. That’s the thing that kills them.”
I was too happy with the new tire to work out what that meant.
It took us a long time to figure out how to replace the tire. Long hours with jacks and tire irons and losing bolts in the weeds by the side of the road, with Heather the whole time up on the battered roof, keeping an eye out for zombies. But we did it.
Together we extracted the broken steel fence post that had impaled my seat, so I would have a place to sit again. The springs stuck out of the hole, and it would never be as comfortable a place for me to ride again, but the seat belt still worked.
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