by Hamill, Ike
The fluid looked the same as the carrion wave back at the Best Buy, but it didn’t move at the same lazy speed. This wave had a purpose. It pushed across the westbound lanes as Robby’s mouth filled with blood. He grabbed for the door handle, but the door wouldn’t budge.
“Shoot,” Robby said. His pierced tongue turned the word into “Thoot,” and blood and spit spilled down his chin. He banged at the door with his shoulder. It seemed like it wanted to open but the upper corner was hanging up on the frame—newly bent from the accident, Robby figured.
He hit the button to lower the window. The motor sounded sick, but the window began to slowly open. He pressed the other button too. The passenger’s window started to descend as well. It went faster. Both windows stopped when the wave impacted the truck’s wheel. All the lights on the dash extinguished as well. He jerked his hand away from the switches, afraid to touch anything after his experience with bike. His window was only halfway down; the other window was a little lower.
Robby dove across the seat and grabbed for the passenger door handle.
The front of the truck dipped, dropping Robby into a six inch free-fall. Stretched across the seat, he pulled the passenger’s door handle and pushed with his other hand. The door groaned, but moved a little. He pulled his legs up and thrust them back against the side of the driver’s seat for leverage.
The front of the truck lurched again, dropping another foot.
Robby wailed away at the door. It sprang free and flew out of his hands. The door swung wide open, hit the limits of the hinges and bounced back. He caught it with stiff arms and held it open as he scrambled across the seat. The floor mat of the truck, where his feet would have been if he’d been riding shotgun, changed color and then disappeared completely. Where the wheel-well should have been, he could now see clear through to the pavement. As the pavement grew and the floor mat disappeared, Robby realized the whole front of the truck was falling at a steady pace now.
The driver’s side was disappearing faster, so the truck tipped to that side. By the time Robby climbed out through the passenger’s door he could almost stand on the side of the truck. He surveyed the pavement quickly. The front edge of the truck was eroding into the puddle of liquid, but the rear still sat over dry asphalt. He leapt to the rear.
He only needed to push himself a few inches to the rear to get clear of the puddle. But with the truck falling, and his pulsing adrenaline, he misjudged the jump. His right foot and hand landed on the dry asphalt, but his left foot came down right on the edge of the puddle. It was more than just a wet spot on the pavement now, but still only an inch or so deep where his foot landed.
The pain scared him because it was like nothing he’d ever felt. The numbness when he’d gripped the bike wheel earlier felt like an electric shock, but where his foot touched the liquid, it felt like a lightning strike. He screamed and tugged at his leg. On the second pull, his knee popped and his foot slipped free from his boot and sock. When Robby’s bare foot pulled out, the boot sunk into the liquid and disappeared before his eyes. The fluid swelled around the spot, and the puddle was instantly several inches deep there.
The last of Robby’s sock vanished. The fluid swelled and then extended a runner towards his bare foot. He sprang to his feet and ran. His naked foot slapped the pavement as he sprinted. After a couple dozen steps, he looked back over his shoulder. The truck silently upended—the front half was now completely gone and the bed and rear wheels stood straight up in the air. The puddle rapidly ate the rest of the truck. It looked like the truck was sinking into a hole opened up in the pavement, but Robby thought the puddle was somehow absorbing the truck’s matter. It wasn’t like acid, he thought. With acid there would be a sizzling or a smell. The puddle was just dissolving things. Selectively. Back at the Best Buy it hadn’t absorbed any of the tents or chairs, but here it consumed everything.
Where the puddle ate his shoe and sock, the puddle struck out after Robby. A thin line of liquid flowed and paused, flowed and paused. It zig-zagged a little and Robby realized the puddle was flowing from spot to spot where his feet had fallen as he ran. He ran up the grass slope to the parking lot of a strip mall. His foot was already starting to feel numb from running barefoot on the pavement, but he knew he didn’t have time to worry about his foot. He glanced back. The stream picked up speed; it now gushed after him. The front of the wave was about half-a-foot deep, but behind the leading edge, he saw some swells which looked at least knee-high.
He thought about his mom. Barefoot running would not have been a problem for her. She’d always gone the whole summer without shoes. She would sometimes sit on the front stoop and file down her callouses, leaving a fine white powder of skin on the flagstones.
He slapped himself in the face. Hard. He recognized that weird nostalgia from the last time he’d been close to the liquid. This was not the time for childhood memories. He started jogging across the parking lot. There was only one car in the lot—parked outside the fabric store—and he didn’t see any corpses around, but he headed that direction anyway.
He gulped in the cold air through his mouth. He forced himself to jog faster. He couldn’t see the flow of the liquid anymore, that was back down the embankment on the road surface, but he sensed the slight hill wouldn’t slow it down. His bare foot ached and threatened to cramp each time he lifted it.
Robby reached the car and tugged on the driver’s door. The handle snapped back. The door was locked. He pulled back and thrust his elbow against the window, but his elbow just bounced off the glass. He looked back over his shoulder. Back at the edge of the parking lot, the liquid was cascading over the curb, forming a pool on the asphalt where Robby had paused to think about his mom.
“Come on,” Robby said. He smacked the window with the palm of his hand and then jogged away from the car parallel to the strip mall. His stride became uneven, favoring his bare foot. A hot knife of pain poked at his right side, under his ribs. He gasped, trying to breathe through the pain.
At the end of the mall, he found a short downhill slope and then another parking lot belonging to the next strip mall. He didn’t look back. He barreled down the hill and kept running, scanning the lot but not seeing any cars in this lot either. He almost ran right past the cars tucked along the side of the end store. They were parked behind a concrete block wall, right next to the dumpsters. Even after he saw them he kept jogging. For no good reason, he turned and jogged over to peek around the wall. That’s when he saw the green-shirted employees who had gone outside for a smoke break before their eyes exploded and they collapsed in a pile with unlit cigarettes in their hands.
He kicked his legs back into a sprint and instantly regretted it. He stubbed his toe and stumbled the rest of the way over to the bodies. He didn’t hesitate at all with the corpses. He rolled the men over and clawed at their pockets. From the three men he came away with two sets of keys and a lighter. He ran to the nearest car—a brown Chevy compact car with New Hampshire plates—and fumbled through the keys. The key with the bow tie fit the door and popped up the lock. He jumped in and cranked the engine as he pulled the seat lever and rocked it forward. The engine caught and he pulled the shift lever into reverse.
The car looked clean but stunk of cigarette smoke. Robby spun the wheel and backed around. He heard a thump from the rear when he backed over one of the smokers’ legs. He shifted to drive and pulled around the cement-block wall.
He stood on the brakes, screeching to a halt—the liquid flowed down the hill between the two parking lots and turned the corner to follow Robby back to the smoking area. He stopped less than ten feet from its edge. Robby clutched the gear shift and chunked it to neutral and then reverse. The Chevy’s engine wound up like a toy as Robby backed up down the alley next to the mall.
The lot extended back behind the building. He turned the wheel just a touch and slowed to a stop. Behind the mall he saw a long access road and loading docks dotting the back wall of the mall. He paused to see what the liquid
would do. Now that he saw an escape route, he wanted to see how smart it was.
The trail of liquid approached the smokers and pooled around them. A fresh branch continued over to where the Chevy had been parked. He watched the corpses dissolve into the puddle—they went quick, without much of a swell of fluid—but the liquid didn’t follow the tire tracks of the Chevy. It swelled and ebbed where he had run, but couldn’t track him in the vehicle.
He wanted to leave while his luck still held. Before he hit the gas again he pulled the seat belt over and buckled himself in. With the rearview mirror adjusted so he could keep an eye out for the liquid, he drove carefully down the access road. It felt good to get his bare foot off the pavement. The foot still felt numb, but at least it wasn’t on cold pavement anymore.
At the far end of the mall, the access road looped around the building and back out to the main parking lot. He slowed and crept the car out slowly back to the main lot. The other end of the lot was so far away that Robby couldn’t even see the flowing liquid pursuing him. He found an exit down to the main road on his side of the lot so he steered for it.
Down at the parking lot exit, Robby paused for several seconds and scanned the road in both directions. He couldn’t see anything of his old truck back to the west, and he didn’t see any sign of wet pavement in either direction. He headed east, towards the highway.
He drove slowly, nervously looking for any signs of damp asphalt. His spirits lifted when he saw the entrance ramp to the highway. He was anxious to start moving south again, regardless of how much his new vehicle smelled of smoke, or how bad his foot was starting to hurt. He rolled down the window and spat a mouthful of salty blood out the window. He probed his swollen tongue against his teeth, wincing at the puncture.
The southbound entrance was first. It swept to the right and gave Robby a long acceleration lane uphill to the level of the highway. Long shadows from the streetlights stretched across the road. He stopped at the first one. He knew it must be a shadow, but the dark pavement could have been wet in that shadow. He crossed it at a crawl, ready to jump out of the Chevy at the first sign of trouble. Nothing happened.
He accelerated again and drove through the second shadow, although he still braced himself when his tires crossed the dark patch of asphalt. The highway here was mostly clear. This part of the road had soft, grassy shoulders and the few deceased cars had veered off the travel lane when their drivers expired.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
ROBBY SAW THE wet trail across the highway from quite a distance. He’d been watching for it. On the other side of the center divider, it looked like the trail blocked the northbound lane as well. Robby put the car in park and left it running. He made a quick stop at the trunk of the Chevy, where he retrieved the jack handle from underneath the spare tire. Then he limped over to a gray Volvo, run aground on an embankment on the right side of the road.
The exploded-eye corpse behind the wheel of the Volvo was a man—Robby guessed he was about his father’s age, which meant about forty-something. The guy looked short. He wore wire-rimmed glasses with little circular lenses, which were now covered from the inside with eye-goo and blood.
Robby stood on his right foot. On his left foot, only his toes touched the cold grass.
“What size do you wear?” Robby asked the corpse through the Volvo’s window. His lacerated tongue felt thick in his mouth, but it also felt good to move it around. “I’m about a nine. Does that sound right?”
Robby swung the jack handle and smashed the glass next to the corpse’s face. He raked out the remnants of the window with the end of the bar and then leaned his head through the window so he could figure out the lock. The door wasn’t even locked. Robby laughed and tugged at the handle. The Volvo emitted a low “bong, bong, bong,” to let Robby know he was opening the door with the ignition engaged.
Robby tried not to step on any of the auto glass with his bare foot as he knelt next to the car to untie the corpse’s shoes. The guy wore ankle-high hiking shoes. Robby approved. He pulled the left one off the man’s foot and held it bottom-to-bottom with the sole of his foot. It looked a little big, but better than nothing. He thought for a second and then took the sock as well before he moved on to the next foot.
“I think these might fit,” he said to the corpse. “Thanks.”
Robby stuffed the socks down into the shoes and slung them over his shoulder to head back to the running Chevy.
“You know what?” he asked, turning. “I’ve got one more question for you.”
Robby smiled—he liked the way his voice sounded on the quiet highway.
“This will just take a second,” he said as he approached the Volvo again, dropped his new shoes and jack handle on the roof, and reached past the steering wheel. “If you’ve got enough battery to sound that bell, maybe you’ve got…”
Robby tried to turn the key off, but it wouldn’t turn past a certain point. He wrinkled his brow and thought through his limited knowledge of cars and driving.
“What’s wrong with this thing?” he muttered under his breath.
He heard his father’s voice in his head—“Gotta be in Park, Robby. Key won’t turn unless it’s in Park.”
“Ah,” Robby said. “Pardon me, sir.”
Robby leaned in farther and tried to move the gear shift lever towards the dash. It went as far as neutral and then stopped.
“What now?” Robby asked.
He heard his father’s voice again—“Foot on the brake. Think, bub.”
“No shit,” Robby said to the corpse. He felt like he was playing Twister with the gray Volvo and the barefoot corpse.
“Left foot, brake,” he said. He slid his bare foot alongside the corpse’s feet and depressed the brake. Then the gear shift slid easily up to Park. With that accomplished, Robby turned the key off and then back on. When he pressed it into starting position the Volvo’s engine fired to life. The gas gauge climbed slowly until it reached three quarters of a tank and then it leveled.
“I’ll be damned,” Robby said. He clapped the corpse on the shoulder and turned the car off.
He grabbed the shoes and jack handle from the roof and turned to hobble back to the Chevy. It took him less than two steps to reconsider. The Chevy was smelly, small, and unreliable-looking. Aside from some eye-splatter, the Volvo looked clean and efficient.
“Thank you sir, I believe I will,” Robby said. He wrestled the corpse out of the Volvo and dragged it a couple of feet away from the door. The man’s glasses flopped back up onto his forehead, and Robby stepped briefly on an uncomfortable piece of glass, but otherwise the procedure was quick and easy. Robby slid behind the seat and found he didn’t even need to adjust the seat. He backed away from the embankment—the sure-footed Volvo didn’t slip at all on the grass—and made a big u-turn across the southbound lanes. He stopped one more time to shut off the Chevy, but he kept the jack handle from the trunk. Before retreating north, Robby took a minute to put on the new shoes and socks. They fit even better than he’d hoped. He used his old sock to mop up some of the eye-juice splattered on the inside of the windshield and then tossed it through the shattered window.
Robby drove north in the southbound lanes until he got to the first police turnaround where he could switch to the northbound lanes. Even though the cars were off the road, it bothered Robby to head towards the fronts of other cars and see the backs of all the signs.
He took the first exit and probed some of the local roads looking for another way south. Robby didn’t get far. Before long he found a wet streak of liquid across each road. The highway seemed like the only road safe enough to travel on, and he would have to go back to the north.
He kept a close watch for any more damp pavement. It got harder to be sure as the sun went down. The headlights tried to turn on automatically, but Robby found the override and turned them off. He didn’t know what kind of attention they might draw, and he didn’t want to find out.
Soon he came to, and traveled o
ver, the bridge back to Maine. He passed the bucking bronco U-Haul, and then the wrecked car with the little boy in the backseat, but they were both in the southbound lanes. Robby observed them like animals at the zoo—sure, they might be dangerous, but they were way over there. He convinced himself they presented no immediate threat to his side of the bridge.
“We’ve gotta stop soon, Volvo. It’s getting dark, and I need some shut-eye,” Robby said. He shifted his eyes quickly from mirror to mirror as soon as he finished the sentence. Somehow it felt natural to talk to corpses, but completely creepy to talk to an empty car. Robby decided to keep his mouth shut and hoped the crawling-skin feeling would subside soon.
He drove north until he found a rest stop. The parking lot had a decent number of cars, and scattered corpses here and there. Most of the bodies were in a loose grouping near the visitors center door. Robby pulled right up to the curb near the door and shut off the Volvo as he peered around in the fading light. He saw no sign of carrion-feeding puddles ready to wreck his car and eat his shoes. He listened to the still evening, but didn’t hear any city-wrecking tornadoes within earshot. The corpses would have unsettled him even a few hours before, but now they seemed almost comforting. With corpses still around, the puddles must not have arrived, or so went Robby’s deduction.
Robby flipped down the visor and slid aside the door to expose a vanity mirror. A light flicked on, but Robby turned it off with the switch. He’d intended to use the mirror to get another view of the highway behind him—he wanted to be able to see every direction at once—but once he caught a glimpse of his eyes, he couldn’t look away. His eyes, framed by the little mirror in the visor, looked just like his Dad’s eyes.
He heard his dad’s voice in his head again—“Go on inside. You can get something to eat and use the bathroom.”