by Joe McKinney
Outside, in the distance, was the sparse industrial tedium of downtown Barstow, nothing but one metal warehouse after another. Traffic was snarled up all around them. They could hear tires skidding, the muffled sounds of people yelling, and every few moments there came the sickening crunch of metal and busting glass from somewhere behind them. People were moving between the cars. Some were running, obviously terrified. Others seemed to be injured. They were staggering through the drifting dust clouds and whirling smoke like wraiths coming out of a fog. Moans and screams surrounded them.
A middle-aged woman slapped a bloody hand against the folding glass door to their right. She was screaming at them for help. Jeff couldn’t make out what she was saying, but her terror was clear.
Then she disappeared down the length of the bus, still banging against the sides.
“Get us the fuck out of here,” Colin said to the driver.
The man looked at Colin and shook his head. “We can’t move,” he said. “We’re stuck.”
Then the driver reached under his seat and came up with a black revolver. “You people stay here,” he said.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Colin said.
The driver didn’t answer him. He threw open the folding doors and stepped down onto the street with his pistol pointed in the air. He looked right, then left, then stalked toward the traffic piled up in front of the bus.
“That fucking idiot,” Colin said. “Where the hell is he going?”
Colin stepped off the bus.
“Colin, wait,” Jeff said, but it was too late. Things were happening too quickly for his acid-muddled mind to catch up.
A moment later, he and Colin’s other two groomsmen were out on the street as well. Jeff felt the desert heat curl his hair, and for a moment the world was swimming around him.
“Colin, wait,” he said.
But Colin wasn’t listening. He was yelling at the driver, who was leveling his revolver at a man staggering toward them from between a pair of Honda Accords.
Jeff grabbed Colin and caught his shirt. Colin swatted at his hand, but when Jeff wouldn’t let go, Colin slid out of the shirt and ran after the bus driver, wearing only his T-shirt and slacks.
Jeff was left holding the shirt. He looked around, momentarily lost, and began to notice all the people. One guy, a kid of perhaps seventeen in torn and blood-soaked clothes, was approaching the bus driver from behind. One part of Jeff’s mind was aware that the kid was infected, and Jeff wanted to scream out for the driver to get out of the way, but that part seemed to be struggling through a dense fog, unable to make itself heard.
A man screamed out behind him. Jeff turned to see one of Colin’s groomsmen throwing a man in blue coveralls to the ground.
The groomsman landed on top of the man, pinning his shoulders to the pavement.
“Help me!” he said.
Jeff was the first to move. To his left was a pickup truck modified with steeple brackets in order to haul large panes of glass. In the confusion, glass had fallen off the truck and broken into pieces on the asphalt. Jeff saw one that looked like an icicle. He scooped it up, wrapped Colin’s shirt around one end to form a handle, and ran back to the two men struggling near the front of the bus.
“Move out of the way,” Jeff said. He had the shard of glass in both hands, the tapered point poised over the infected man’s face.
The groomsman didn’t move.
“Get out of the way,” Jeff said.
“I can’t,” the man shot back. “Just do it. Hurry.”
The zombie was clawing at the groomsman’s face. The groomsman was doing his best to deflect the zombie’s hands with his elbows, but he already had several deep gashes on his jaw and on his neck.
“Hurry,” he shouted.
Jeff took a breath and slammed the glass down. The point went deep into the zombie’s eye, stopping only when the edges of the glass caught in the orbital bone around the socket and couldn’t go any deeper.
Jeff lost his balance and fell over, the glass shard snapping with a brittle crack.
The groomsman climbed off the zombie, and the zombie made no effort to get up. He lay there with his arms spread eagle to the clear blue desert sky, his mouth open. His teeth were black with dried blood.
Jeff was sitting now, his back against a truck tire, watching the zombie. He heard a whimpering sound, and when he looked up, he saw that it was Colin, backing away from the carnage. He was shaking his head, a comma-shaped lock of his rumpled hair moving on his forehead with the motion.
Someone was yelling his name.
He looked to the bus and saw Robin standing there, pointing off to his right.
“Help him,” she said. “He’s got a gun. Help him.”
Jeff saw the driver backing up into the side of a Toyota 4Runner. In front of him was a man whose face was badly burned on one half, as though he’d slept in a puddle of battery acid. One arm hung limply at his side. The other was reaching for the driver. The driver fired at the man, hitting him in the limp arm. The burned zombie twisted away from the hit, but didn’t cry out.
“Ah, fuck me,” the driver said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
He fired again, but this time only managed to hit the side of the car behind the zombie.
Colin’s other groomsman was kneeling beside his injured friend. Jeff grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to his feet. “Help me,” he said.
“Fuck off,” the groomsman said. He swatted Jeff’s hand away, then knelt again next to his friend, who was starting to convulse.
“You can’t do anything for him,” Jeff said.
The other man ignored him.
Jeff stood there, looking around uncertainly. He wasn’t sure what to do. His thoughts were so damn foggy. He took a step forward, stopped, then started forward again. Jeff grabbed the uninjured groomsman by the shoulder and pulled him away.
“Help me with the driver,” he said.
The man wheeled on Jeff and took a wild swing at his face. The blow missed by a good six inches, but it caused both men to teeter off balance and they stumbled backward. Jeff kept his feet and caught the other man. He pushed him up to his feet and stepped back right as another shot rang out, and this one was so close he heard it whiz past his ear.
In front of him, the groomsman he had just put back on his feet doubled over, punched in the gut by the bullet. A woman screamed. The groomsman swayed for a long moment on wobbly legs, then looked up at Jeff and fell over.
Confused, Jeff turned around. The bus driver was backing away from him. He didn’t seem to be aware of what he had just done. His expression was pure panic. The gun in his hand was shaking. He raised it once again, this time pointing it somewhere over Jeff’s shoulder.
The driver never saw the man who pulled him down from behind. Jeff watched him fall between a pickup truck and a Chevy Malibu and heard him screaming as the zombie tore into him.
When the screaming stopped, Jeff heard Robin calling his name. Colin was there, pushing his way past her and onto the bus in a panicked rush. Jeff stood in the middle of the highway, a dashed white line between his feet, and watched in horror as Colin dropped down behind the wheel, put the bus in gear, and hit the gas.
The bus lurched backward, traveled a few feet, and crashed into something.
“What are you doing?” Jeff said. “Wait.”
But Colin made no sign he’d heard him. He wrestled with the gearshift, then hit the gas again. He turned the wheel hand over hand, veering just to the right of Jeff.
There was another crash as the bus collided with a row of parked cars, but this time Colin didn’t let up. He kept the gas pedal mashed to the floor. Jeff heard the engine straining, the tires starting to slip on the asphalt.
The cars moved sideways. Slowly, inch by inch, the bus pushed its way through the cars.
Jeff glanced up at the windshield. Robin was there, screaming at him. She was waving him inside, toward the door. He jumped over a car’s hood just
as the bus pushed it to the shoulder. Then he scrambled around the front of the bus and jumped on. He lunged forward and hit the lever to snap the doors shut behind him.
Colin was screaming at the top of his lungs as he piloted the bus forward through the cars. Jeff watched him and thought, Jesus help us, he’s fucking lost it.
Jeff held onto the railing next to the stairs as the bus bounced off the roadway. Peering over the dashboard, he could see they were headed for a large, and nearly empty, surface street. Colin straightened the bus out and as soon as they were on paved roads again he stopped screaming, though the muscles in his arms were still tightly knotted, his knuckles a bloodless white on the steering wheel.
“Colin,” Jeff said. “Colin, slow down.”
It took Colin a moment for the sense of what Jeff was saying to sink in, but when it did, he lifted his foot off the gas, and the bus slowed to a stop.
Jeff put a hand on his arm and pulled at it until Colin finally let go of the wheel.
“Come on,” he said, and guided Colin out of the driver’s seat. With Robin’s help, he managed to get Colin into a chair on the other side of the aisle. Then he dropped down behind the wheel and peered out the windshield. They could still hear screams and crunching metal from the freeway behind them, and here and there they saw people running, but the road ahead of them seemed relatively clear. A nearby street sign said they were at the intersection of Barstow Road and Windy Pass.
“What are we going to do?” Robin said.
“Figure out where we are first.”
He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out his cell phone. One bar. Good enough. He called up the menu and went to Google Maps. Right away, a map of the city popped up on the tiny screen. Barstow seemed to be laid out precisely along a north–south east–west grid. He zoomed in on their position, and a street name caught his eye.
“Jeff?” Robin said.
He looked over his shoulder at her. “It’s okay,” he said. “At least, I think it is. Here. Look at this.”
He showed her the map. With his thumb, he pointed to a horseshoe-shaped road on the southern edge of town.
“Harvard Street?” she said.
“Yep.”
“But it doesn’t go anywhere.”
There is a joke in there somewhere, he thought. He found it very funny, and he told himself he’d have to explain it to her sometime.
“It doesn’t,” he agreed. “But look at this.”
He pointed south of the horseshoe to a long, pencil-thin line on the map called Pipeline Road.
“It goes all the way to Interstate Forty, way over here. We bypass all the major population areas and end up here.”
She looked out at the desert doubtfully. “You think we can make it? I bet that road’s not even paved.”
“I don’t see that we’ve got any other choice.”
“No,” she said. “I guess we don’t.”
He smiled at her, then put the bus in gear.
CHAPTER 21
Reggie led Kyra out into the hall, then held her shoulders as he guided her around the corpses on the floor.
She stepped on the side of what felt like the heel of a man’s boot and stumbled.
Reggie caught her, steadied her. “You okay?” he asked.
The carpet felt wet, squishy beneath Kyra’s sneakers.
“Who were they?”
“That’s Jake back there. And there’s the Kirby kids up here. I forget their names.”
“Ruth and Max,” she said.
He grunted and continued to guide her through the living room. She could feel his fingers trembling on her shoulders.
“Misty Mae said Jake was sick last night.”
Another grunt.
She said, “Did you see Misty Mae?”
“Yeah. She’s outside with the baby.”
Kyra brightened. “She’s okay?”
He didn’t answer right away, and the silence was chilling.
“No,” he said. “She was changed. I couldn’t even tell at first—you know how you can tell with most of them? She didn’t have no bite marks or blood on her or nothing. It was like there was nothing wrong with her. Not till she turned around on me and I saw those eyes. They’d gone all milky, like a dead person’s eyes.”
“Did you…”
They were going down the steps now, out into the yard. It was still bright enough out for the light to show up on her eyes, and she squeezed them shut against it.
“Uncle Reggie?”
“She’s dead, Kyra.”
“And the baby?”
“You don’t want to know about that,” he said. “I had to…”
But he didn’t offer anything else, just trailed off into silence.
Their shoes clattered on the pavement. They slowed, and Uncle Reggie kept a hand on her as he pushed the gate open. The creaking of its hinges seemed deafening.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“Away from here, baby. Things are bad.”
“Tell me, Reggie.”
He opened the door to his truck and helped her inside. “I want you to stay here,” he said. “You hear me? Don’t move. This’ll just take a second.”
“What are—”
But he had closed the door in her face. She leaned back against the cracked vinyl seats, listening to the wind blowing dust against the cab of the truck and the faint grating of the sand against the glass.
She thought back on the night before, listening in her bed to the alley-cat sounds of Jake and Misty Mae having sex in the trailer next door. Misty Mae had said Jake was sick when he came home from Odessa. Had he been infected then? That seemed likely to Kyra. And that made her wonder just how Misty Mae had gotten her infection. Uncle Reggie had mentioned that Misty Mae didn’t have any wounds, like you’d get if you were attacked. Had she gotten hers in the bedroom? Were the little swimmers in his baby batter a bunch of zombies, changing her from the inside out?
The thought made her shudder. God, what a way to go, she thought.
And then a shotgun blast silenced that line of thinking. She sat bolt upright in the seat, waiting.
A moment later, Uncle Reggie was climbing into the driver’s seat. He was out of breath and he had to fight with his keys to get them into the ignition. He tossed the shotgun up against Kyra’s left leg. She put her hand around it—the barrel was hot—and waited to see what was going to happen.
“Hold on,” he told her.
The transmission made a grinding noise, and he cussed under his breath. Kyra felt a renewed wave of uneasiness wash over her. She’d lived with the man nearly all her life and she had never heard him say a cross word. He must be scared, she thought.
They tore away from the curb with a stuttering bark from the tires. Kyra grabbed hold of the door and tried to brace herself.
“Uncle Reggie,” she said. “Slow down, please. Uncle Reggie.”
“They’re everywhere, Kyra,” he said.
A car skidded by them, tires shrieking. A horn blared, and kept on blaring as it receded into the distance behind them.
“Uncle Reggie, please. Please stop.”
They went around another corner. She heard the engine’s exhaust note drop an octave, and soon they were coasting at normal speed.
“What’s happening?” she said.
“The whole place, Kyra. Jesus, there’s bodies everywhere. And the town’s on fire. The propane yard…my God, there’s so much smoke.”
She could smell it. Had smelled it, in fact.
“Where are we?”
“Up near the freeway,” he said. “I don’t know. Over near Wayne Blessing’s place, I think.”
West end of town, she thought. A whole lot of empty nothingness stretching out before them, desert all the way to the horizon, and beyond.
“What about Billy Ledlow?” she asked, referring to the town’s one and only peace officer, a part-timer who also worked the day shift at the Village Pantry grocery store on Wilma Street.
/> “Baby, there’s nothing. My God. They’re all killing each other. I saw ole Ms. Wendy Gruber eatin’ on somebody in the alleyway behind her shop. I threw up all over myself.”
Maybe that was what she smelled, she thought. They had cleared the smoke now, she guessed, and the air inside the truck was thick with the smell of rot. It was like a package of chicken that had been left out back in the garbage for a few days.
She said, “Uncle Reggie, what are we gonna do?”
“I don’t know, baby. I gotta get you outta here. It…it ain’t safe here.”
A silence settled over them, and it stretched on and on.
Uncle Reggie had his window down. She could feel the wind blowing from that direction, and with it came that smell again, that stink of something rotting in the sun.
She said, “Uncle Reggie,” and waited.
“Yeah, baby?”
“I don’t want you to lie to me,” she said.
“I won’t ever lie to you, Kyra, you know that.”
She waited.
He was silent.
Finally, she said, “Uncle Reggie, tell me the truth. Did you get bit? Is that what I smell?”
He took a long time to answer, but at last he said, “Yeah. On my left shoulder.”
“Is it bad?”
“Bad enough. It hurts.”
“Did you…do anything for it?”
“Like what?” he said. “Can’t do nothing for it, you know that. They ain’t got no cure.”
She nodded, and they were both silent again.
“Damn it,” he muttered, a little while later.
“What is it?”
“Kyra, I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to focus. This town ain’t got more than twenty streets and I keep getting lost. I can’t find the fuckin’ highway. My head is swimming. I can’t stop sweatin’. It’s like I got the flu or something. I keep blackin’ out.”
He coughed, hard, and it sounded like he was bringing something up.
She reached out a hand to touch his shoulder.
“No, don’t,” he said, and flinched away from her when her fingertips touched his shirtsleeve.