by Bryan Smith
Then he sighed and put the knife away.
No.
They’d be expecting him, would be watching for him. He smiled as a new course of action came to him.
Something that might actually be more fun.
He crossed the street, stepped through a break in a small hedge, and hunkered down. While he watched the rear door of the apartment building he rubbed the flat of the blade against his crotch and remembered that go-go boot.
CHAPTER SIX
On the Garden State Parkway
September 27
6:10 p.m.
“It’s quiet out there.”
Warren felt Amanda’s warm breath on his ear. It was reassuring, that warmth. It meant life. Survival. As long as they were drawing breath, they still had a chance. He reached for her hand in the darkness, held it tight, and was pleased to find that it only shook slightly in his grasp.
His other hand tested the smooth metal of the closed trailer door. They’d been safe here in the dark throughout the day, but Warren had a feeling that had as much to do with luck as anything else.
Amanda sighed. “I think we can go out there now.”
Warren frowned. “I don’t know. We’re all right here. I think we should still wait a while. Until…”
Amanda waited a beat, then said, “Until what, Warren? Until help comes?” She breathed an exasperated sigh. “Help’s not coming.”
“You don’t know that.”
But, thing was, somehow he _did_ know that. Felt it deep down in his gut. Help wasn’t coming. Ever. Which scared the shit out of him. He wanted to be strong for both of them, wanted to protect Amanda and somehow safely steer her through this nightmare. It was silly, this macho desire to play the chivalrous hero, some kind of knight errant. Especially considering how little faith he had in his ability to shield either of them against the dangers awaiting them.
They hadn’t glimpsed the outside world in many hours. They’d abandoned their own car after one of those flying things had picked it up and heaved it across four lanes of traffic. They should be dead. But they’d been saved by a combination of buckled seatbelts and properly deployed airbags. Warren believed the ballooning white bags had confused the screeching creatures and sent them off in search of other prey. They managed to fight free of the bags and extract themselves from the ruined car.
The sky above them was full of the flying things. When one of them started screeching in a particularly manic way, Warren gripped Amanda by the hand and made a dash for a jackknifed tractor trailer, which sat astride two and a half lanes of dead highway. No cars moved now. The stretch of asphalt between them and the trailer was an obstacle course of twisted wreckage and broken bodies. Here and there the road was dotted with splashes of dark crimson.
The trailer door stood open, beckoning to them the way a lonely church in the middle of nowhere calls to a wayward pilgrim. They managed to get inside and pull the door shut before one of the flying beasts could pounce on them. Any one of those things could have pulled the door off the trailer with ease. So Warren figured they hadn’t been spotted after all. Which, as best he could tell, meant they’d only delayed certain horrible death.
It was Armageddon out there.
“I can’t stand it in here any longer.” Amanda’s voice had a plaintive note now, was just a breath away from a whine—not that he could condemn the impulse to whine, given the circumstances. “It’s worse this way. This waiting. It’s so quiet. I really don’t think they’re out there anymore.”
Warren grunted. “So you’re psychic now?”
Amanda’s grip tightened on his hand, a signal that a burst of temper was imminent. “I can do without the sarcasm, Warren. If you want, I’ll leave by myself and we’ll go our separate ways. You can go back to fucking Newark, or Nashville, or wherever the hell, and I’ll make it to Florida on my own.”
Warren breathed a weary sigh. “Please chill, okay? I’m sorry. I said I’d get you home and I meant it.”
He gave the door a shove and it swung open with a loud squeal that made them both cringe. They stood at the edge of the trailer and stared at a sky nearly overtaken by the full-dark of evening. Except for a mass of dark clouds, the sky was empty, devoid of careening winged demons. Ahead of them, the fading light made the assemblage of trashed and abandoned cars look like a spooky automotive graveyard.
Warren jumped to the ground. Then he offered a hand to Amanda and helped her down. She hugged herself tight and shivered. She pressed herself against Warren and he wrapped an arm around her.
“What do we do now?”
She sounded lost and afraid, almost like a child. It made Warren further regret his snappishness of a moment ago. Protect her, he thought. Do whatever it takes.
He coughed. “I…I’m not sure. I guess we should start by looking for a car that’ll still run.”
She groaned. “In this mess? We’re doomed.”
Warren surveyed the discouraging array of wrecks, dismissing each of them without a second glance—until his gaze settled on a tan Ford Escort hunched against the far guardrail. Its rear and passenger side windows were blown out, and it had a flat rear tire on the driver’s side.
Warren said, “Let’s check that one out.”
Amanda frowned. “It’s got a flat.”
“That might not be a problem.”
They crossed the street carefully, stepping over mounds of debris and, one time, the corpse of a demon. Looking at it reminded Warren strongly of pictures he’d seen of victims of poison gas attacks. Its strange limbs were contorted and its mouth was stretched wide in an expression of obvious agony.
Amanda said, “Look, there’s another one.”
Warren saw it. This one was much smaller than the other, with wings that were a sickly pale gray rather than the coal-black of most of its brethren. Its dead red eyes looked like billiard balls. “I wonder what happened to them?”
“Maybe they can’t survive long in our world.” Amanda sounded hopeful, almost excited. “Maybe something in our atmosphere kills them if they breathe it too long.”
Warren shrugged. “Could be.”
He hoped she was right. More than anything else, he wanted the world to revert to some semblance of normality. The angst that had possessed him for so long seemed ridiculous now. He’d give anything if he could jump back in time a few years and force his younger self to get over Emily quicker and move on in a more positive direction in his life.
Might as well wish on a shooting star, you whimsical fool…
“Oh, Warren.” Amanda put a hand over her mouth.
They were close to the Escort now. Warren saw immediately what had so disturbed Amanda. The car was full of dead people. A dead woman behind the wheel. A dead child in the passenger seat. He felt weak in the knees as they came to a stop alongside the car—a car that was essentially a family’s mangled coffin.
Amanda shivered again. And there was a note of pleading in her voice when she said, “Let’s look for another car, okay? There’s got to be another one.”
Warren gripped her firmly by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “They’re all gonna be like this. I don’t think we should waste a lot of time looking for something else.” He nodded at the larger of the dead demons. “We can’t be sure these things are all dead. Remember how many of them there were? And we only see two dead ones. Fact is, we don’t know what the hell’s going on. Same as before.”
Amanda frowned. “So…what? We’re just gonna haul those poor people out of their car and dump them in the road?”
Warren closed his eyes a moment.
God, but he felt so tired.
He looked at Amanda. “Yeah,” he said, sounding solemn but steadfast. “That’s exactly what we’re gonna do. Only I’ll do the dirty work. You won’t have to touch them.”
Amanda gagged when Warren opened the passenger side door and the woman’s corpse fell out. “Oh. This is so vile. So wrong.”
Warren hooked his hands under the dead wom
an’s armpits. He swallowed hard to suppress his own rising tide of nausea. “I won’t argue that point.”
He planted his feet and pulled hard, and stumbled backward when he failed to encounter the expected degree of resistance. He landed flat on his back amid a pile of another victim’s entrails. Amanda shrieked. Jagged bolts of pain shot down each of his splayed limbs. He opened his eyes and saw Amanda kneeling over him. She was saying “Ohmygodohmygod” over and over, like a stuck record. He blinked his eyes to clear his vision and groaned as he painfully pushed himself into a sitting position.
The top half of the dead woman’s body lay on the street next to the car. The bottom half of her body—from approximately the waist down—was still positioned behind the steering wheel. Well, that accounted for his miscalculation. He’d figured on having to haul out a good deal more dead weight.
He got to his feet and moved forward on legs still wobbly from the fall.
Amanda laid a hand on his shoulder. “What do you think you’re doing?”
He looked at her. “Finishing what I started.”
Amanda shook her head vehemently. “No. Fuck that. No way we’re riding in that bloody mess of a car. Look at you.” She indicated his soiled clothes with a wave. “You already look like you stepped out of a slaughterhouse. Nuh uh. I’d rather take my chances on foot.”
Warren sighed. “You sure about that? Even though there’s no guarantee there won’t be more of those flying things?”
She nodded. “I’m fucking positive, pal.”
Warren’s shoulders sagged. “Well, then.” His gaze drifted back to the Escort. “I bet there’s a spare tire in that trunk. I bet that car would take us a long ways. Gonna be a shame to leave it behind.”
“We’ll survive.”
Warren wasn’t so sure. He believed their odds of long-term survival hovered somewhere between slim and nonexistent. But he wasn’t about to lie down in the road and wait for death to come screeching out of the sky either.
“Fine. So what’s our next move?”
Her gaze followed the twisting stretch of dark highway. “Start walking, I guess.”
“Should we see if anything’s salvageable from you car first? Our bags, at least?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
Determining the approximate location of Amanda’s car was a simple matter of following an almost straight line backward from the trailer. They picked their way through the debris again and arrived at the mangled green Taurus. A shudder of retroactive terror swept through Warren at the sight of it. It was totaled. Not even a salvage yard would take it now. He muttered a silent prayer to the God of Airbags and leaned through the blown-out driver’s side window.
The keys were still in the ignition. He pulled them out and moved to the rear of the car. He slid the key in the trunk lock and gave it a twist. He tugged at the trunk lid, but it wouldn’t budge.
Amanda said, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s stuck. The crash did something to it, I guess.”
Amanda pushed him aside. Her right foot shot out and the heel of her black boot clanged against metal. The trunk lid popped open.
Warren gave her a sheepish look. “I loosened it for you.”
She smirked. “Sure.”
They hauled their bags out. Warren had just one. A light traveling bag with a shoulder strap. Amanda had several bags and suitcases. She opened the suitcases and began rooting through them.
Warren frowned. “What are you doing?”
She spoke without looking up or pausing in her work. “Obviously we can’t carry all this stuff. So I’m consolidating.”
Warren left her to it for the moment, returning to the car to retrieve a couple more useful items—a tire iron from the trunk and the Maglite flashlight from the glove compartment.
Amanda’s gaze flicked to the tire iron. “Good idea.”
Warren shrugged. “I don’t imagine it’d be much protection against one of those things. But I’ve got a feeling they’re not the only danger out there now.”
Amanda grunted. “Yeah.”
She zipped up a bag similar to Warren’s and slung it over her shoulder. She stood up and said, “Let’s get our asses in gear, boy. It’s a long fuckin’ way to Florida.”
Warren almost smiled. “I’m sure we won’t have to walk all that way. We’ll find a car we can use. Or hitch a ride. Something.”
She patted his shoulder. “Sure. We can hope for that. Now let’s go.”
They turned south and took their first steps down that long road.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hunstville, AL
September 27
6:30 p.m.
Zeke finally decided to leave the bathroom of his Days Inn motel room for a simple reason—he was bored. Also, he was hungry. And thirsty. The sink’s faucet would only yield a thin trickle of brown-tinted water. There was a curiosity factor at work, too—he wanted to know what was going on in the world outside this tiny room.
He moved to the door and gripped the brass doorknob.
And he hesitated.
Hours had passed since he’d last heard anything like the chaotic sounds of mass destruction that had dominated the earlier part of the day. Instinct told him it was now safe to venture beyond the confines of this room, which wasn’t exactly a fortified bunker anyway. He knew well enough that his survival to this point was a product of sheer luck. Did he really want to push that luck now, regardless of what his instincts told him?
The answer, apparently, was yes.
The same caution-damning impulse that caused him to walk away from his job at VNC was at work again, making him turn the doorknob and pull the door open. He felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck tingle when he got a look at the hole in the middle of the room. The front end of the small bed had fallen into it, partially plugging it. But there were still glimpses of that horrible deep darkness around the edge.
He had a brief but strong impulse to throw the door shut and retreat again to his seat on the toilet. Instead, he edged slowly into the room, scanning every corner for signs of lurking monsters.
Nothing.
He breathed a sigh of relief and moved farther into the room. He stayed close to the walls, giving the collapsed bed a wide berth. He was contemplating his next move when he spied a glimpse of something shiny on the floor.
He groaned. “Damn.”
His keys had fallen off the nightstand and now lay on the floor perhaps an inch away from the edge of the hole. With great reluctance, he dropped to his hands and knees and began to inch toward the hole. On the off-chance something else from that strange dark realm might emerge, he wanted to present as small a target as possible. When he was a foot away from the keys, he glanced at the largest section of visible blackness—about the size of an open manhole —and saw something pale flickering there.
Something like a coiled, segmented whip—with eyes.
Zeke gulped.
He snatched the keys off the floor and scurried backward. The stalk with eyes emerged from the hole and stared at him as he got to his feet. It made a sound like squealing brakes. He cringed and stumbled backward. The sound was a sharp blade plunging through the middle of his skull. The visible part of the creature convulsed, the stalk shaking so hard it became a pale blur. Seeing this made him think of a rattlesnake about to strike.
The association made him turn and dash out of the room. He heard a rumbling behind him. Then a groaning, splintering sound and a crash. Zeke didn’t glance back to see for himself, but he had a feeling the hole was blocked no longer. He ran flat-out for the far end of the parking lot, where his powder blue Thunderbird convertible was parked. There was evidence of carnage all around—bodies, distant fires, and ruined buildings—but he couldn’t afford to be distracted by the nightmarishness of it all. An instant’s hesitation could be all that separated him from survival and death.
As he neared the car, he fumbled for the electronic fob and the keys nearly slipped from his hands. He cried out
and seized them tighter before they could fall. He found the unlock button and pushed it twice. The car’s lights blinked. A moment later he yanked the driver’s side door open and fell in behind the wheel. He jammed the key in the ignition, twisted it, and the engine roared. He put the car in gear and mashed the gas pedal to the floor. The car shot forward, bouncing twice as it hopped over the concrete slab between parking spaces. The jouncing motion threw the door shut and the car peeled out of the lot.
The rumbling sound receded as he turned left and rocketed through the middle of town. The posted speed limit here was forty, but the needle on his speedometer was edging up close to ninety. Judging from the war zone look of his surroundings, he doubted he needed to worry about violating traffic laws. The needle hit the one-hundred MPH mark and kept moving. Such was his terror of the thing he’d barely glimpsed. He wasn’t sure if he could stop. But then he saw a looming 3-way T intersection, which would require him to slow and turn either left or right.
He tapped the brake pedal a few times, slowing just enough to whip the wheel to the right, peel out, and keep going. He’d reached the outskirts of the small city by the time he finally felt able to risk a glance at his rearview mirror.
He sighed.
Whatever that thing was, he’d left it behind. So he was safe again. For now. But he knew that might not be the case for long. This was a new world, one no longer ruled by men. There were other strange creatures out here; more of the things with the jittery stalks, and more of the flying demons, and more of who knew what the hell else. A hole could open in the road ahead of him and swallow the Thunderbird whole.
The thought made him gulp.
He switched on the Thunderbird’s high beams and slowed down, tapping the brake until he was moving at a rate slightly below the posted speed limit. He leaned forward and studied the road ahead. He saw right away it was a good thing he’d abandoned his NASCAR-driver-gone-psycho impression. The road was littered with stalled cars and pieces of cars ripped apart by the winged invaders. There were bodies and parts of bodies, both human and non-human. He steered carefully through the grisly obstacle course, at one point driving several dozen yards along the road’s shoulder to skirt an especially congested stretch of asphalt. He glanced at one burned-out metal hulk and shuddered at the sight of the charred skeleton still ensconced behind the wheel. Then he was on the road again and the way ahead was relatively clear.