The zombies reacted immediately to the emergence of Scooter, who seemed heroically to make as much noise as possible running the opposite way, barking and snarling. The infected milling around the booth turned as one and went after the canine.
“Now. We’ve got to make a break for it.”
Shaun growled, an anguished, tear-choked sound as he swallowed the hard truth of the situation. There was no sense allowing Scooter’s self-sacrifice to be made in vain.
“Come on!” Dejah hissed.
They ran from the booth. Dejah vaulted over the toll gate. Shaun went underneath with the duffel bag. Off the lake, the brisk winds came cold and crisp with the scent of fish. The water gleamed with a pre-dawn light as they edged around the back of a Chevy Impala, climbed over two cars, hopped over a motorcycle, and ran across twenty corpse-laden yards to the Jeep they’d marked for use.
Dejah pulled open the driver door and screamed. A heavy woman in sweats with a dark mottled complexion and feral eyes fell out the door. Worst of all, on the back seat of the Jeep a baby was strapped into a car seat, growling like a caged animal, thrashing against its straps, clawing the air. The woman grabbed Dejah’s ankle and mewled. Dejah had to force herself not to fire the gun into her head. Shaun helped kick her away.
“There!” He pointed at a long, old white Cadillac with chrome rims, and dark-tinted windows. It looked like a tank, the kind of a car they made in the 1970s, like from an old TV show.
Dejah took the cue and ran for the driver’s side door. Shaun went to the passenger’s side. Dejah paused and looked over the roof of the car at him. The zombie mom in sweats was shambling toward them. A few others were awakened now by the scent of their flesh and the sounds of commotion.
“My side’s locked.” Shaun said in a panic.
Dejah swallowed hard and pulled open the car door. She stepped back and aimed the revolver into the driver seat. It was empty. Keys dangled in the ignition. She jumped in and reached across the great expanse of the front seat, unlocking Shaun’s door. He got in. When they shut the doors they paused to take in the car’s interior: fuzzy dice hung from the rearview mirror, rick-rack with pom-poms hung from the velvet ceiling. The steering wheel was furrier than a Yeti. A bobble-head Madonna was adhered to the front dash in a big glob of hardened glue, and hanging from a string of rosary beads, Christ dangled in all his plastic glory, crucified on a glow-in-the-dark cross.
Dejah twisted the keys in the ignition. The car fired up right away. Two zombies were coming at them from the front of the car. She floored the gas pedal and plowed into them. One of them seemed to break in half on the front left fender of the car. The second bounded up onto the hood, denting metal as its head came down with a thud. Its body twisted and crumpled, smearing blood over the windshield as it flew up and over the cab, landing finally on the asphalt behind them in a pile of writhing, infected flesh.
Dejah turned on the headlights. The windshield wipers came on, smearing the brackish blood across their view until she activated the juice to wash it away.
Shaun turned around and looked behind them, over the back seat, and through the rear window. Adrenalin surged in the aftermath of their escape. Sadness at Scooter’s loss hung heavily with him, the mournful ghost of a good friend.
“I’m sorry, Shaun,” Dejah said, reading the expression on his face like she could read his mind. She was steering the car around a Toyota Prius, maneuvering their way along the bridge to the other side.
“Yeah,” he said, morose. “Yeah, me too.” He turned around and sat stoically in the passenger seat, watching through the front window. They drew closer to the tall hill where the DBU campus and its bell tower silhouetted in the moonlit sky.
* * *
Dejah and Shaun made small talk to distract them from the horrors of the night, and of the last week, but all the while she was watching the road, thinking the lack of vehicles so far was pretty fortunate. Then they hit a small snarl at the intersection of 303 and Duncanville Road, where they had to turn and head south.
“What a mess,” Shaun said. He leaned forward in the passenger seat, studying what looked like a crash-up derby gone public. Cars were wedged into the intersection as if a massive electromagnet had been activated at the crossroads, piling them together.
The sun was creeping toward the horizon and cast a low orange glow into the sky. It gave her the first view of Shaun in daylight. A few hours together and she already felt like they’d known each other forever. One helluva kid, she thought. And he’s been through nothing but hell. The fact that he wasn’t a quivering mess right now said a lot.
Dejah rolled the car to a slow stop. She studied the wreckage around them, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror in case any infected were shambling around waiting for their next meal. “I can back up and try to drive over the curb. Maybe make it across the parking lot of that thrift store and go around all this to get where we’re going.”
“Long as we don’t pop a tire on the all the curbs.”
“The other option is to get out and change cars.”
Shaun went pale.
“I’d like to avoid that if possible. Besides—” she let a grin curl the corner of her mouth, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown pretty attached our Mexican hoopty here.”
“You’ve got a point there. This is one sweet ride. It’s got some great shocks. And you can’t beat a glow-in-the-dark Jesus.”
“Maybe if we pass a jewelry store we can stop off and get you some serious bling.”
“And a purple velvet top hat with a leopard band.”
“And a diamond encrusted chrome belt buckle that says Pimp Daddy,” Dejah said.
Shaun laughed. “We are so white.”
“I’ll take that as vote for the curb.”
She backed up. The Cadillac went easily onto the curb. It had been so long since she’d driven a car with a V8 she forgot how powerful the engine was. It bounced and scraped a bit as it landed on the downside. The bumper raked across the asphalt with an awful sound as they pulled into the southbound lane of Duncanville Road.
“Glad this dude didn’t lower his car any more than he did,” she said as they listened to the grating of metal against concrete. And she was also glad they didn’t have to get out, as she peered at a scattering of infected zombies drawn out of hiding by their commotion.
“Well done,” Shaun said.
“Thank you.”
She looked at the dash gauges. “Unfortunately, we may have to push our luck again here shortly.” The red needle on the gas gauge edged toward a big fat E.
Shaun looked too. “Oh, man. That sucks.”
“We need gas.”
It wasn’t critical at the moment, but it would be shortly. For as smooth and powerful a ride the old Cadillac provided, it was also a gas hog. Dejah found herself leaning forward in the seat, knuckles clinging to the steering wheel. As she steered around a motorcycle in the street and an El Camino up on the median, she squinted into the distance, issuing a silent plea to the heavens for a gas station to appear. Her back muscles were knotted like tensile steel. Her pecks tightened with her forearms, and her neck muscles were hard as vulcanized rubber. Her whole body was on high alert. The end of the first leg of their ride was over. They were going to have to get out and do something, whether that was getting gas, or acquiring another car. The mere thought shot her full of stress. She noticed Shaun was rigid in his seat as well.
He glanced at the duffel bag between them. “We’re also going to need more food. Not much left in here but water and a couple of candy bars.”
“What happened to those last packs of beef jerky?”
His cheeks blushed. “Sorry, I was starving.”
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll find some food, too.”
The sun was breaking over the horizon. It came with a blaze of orange the color of flame, igniting ripples of cirrus clouds amber and gold. What the light revealed here were just more reminders of the holocaust that had befallen the
whole area. A dog picked clean of flesh, mostly just bone. Half of a dead man on a street corner, propped on the stump of his ragged torso like some kind of sick version of a panhandler. A skinny corpse lay face down in a run-down Mexican restaurant’s parking lot. A handful of infected wandered around under the overhang of Eagle Wheel and Tire, chrome rims colored with crimson. The eyes of the infected followed them along their way.
“Well, there’s some of them,” she muttered.
“I’ve been noticing that, too. It seems so abandoned. I mean, where did they all go?”
“They probably concentrate wherever there’s food, I would guess.”
“Maybe they hibernate,” Shaun said. “You know, until they sense, or smell, or hear, food.”
“Maybe,” Dejah said.
“There’s a store!” Shaun’s arm shot straight, pointing at a mostly vacant strip mall. The corner of it held a convenience store that had more iron bars along the front than a pawnshop in a ghetto. Along with the bars, iron grating barricaded the interior of the windows and big steel, roll-down security doors shored up the doors. A yellow sign that looked like it had been hand painted over an old Sonoco sign read: Bocadomart.
“We really need gas, too,” Dejah said, absently, uneasiness taking root deep inside her. Not that the feeling of uneasiness had ever left since Selah and Thomas had gone to Greenville, but this was something more. She attributed it to being in a strange neighborhood. Through Arlington and Grand Prairie and Greenville, she knew her way around. But off the beaten path in between, she was a stranger, as lost as someone from another state. She didn’t like that feeling. Not knowing where back roads led, where potential emergency escape routes lay, where the nearest fucking gas station was.
Despair came over her as she realized the one ancient-looking gas pump present, had no nozzle, the numbers were set on zeros, and the plastic front was clouded yellow from age. That thing hadn’t been touched for probably two decades, if not more. No gas there.
“We really need some gas,” she said again, quietly, mostly to herself, but out loud just in case the heavens were still taking orders.
“What we really need,” Shaun said, “is that.”
In the parking lot of Bocadomart, parked right out front of the store, shining black with polished chrome as shiny as the day it rolled off the line, was a Hummer H3. It looked like a diamond in a sea of coal the way it was surrounded by the potholed parking lot, the trash littered sidewalk of the strip mall with its taped-up signs and broken windows in one of the vacant spots. But the fact that it was parked right in front of the Bocadomart, which was about as secure a convenience store as she’d ever seen, seemed almost too good to be true.
Dejah pulled the Cadillac into the lot. She rolled up alongside the Hummer and put the Caddy into park. She didn’t shut off the engine yet, but reached to the seat where the revolver lay. She rested her hand on the pistol grip, leaning down to look into the Hummer’s cab. She didn’t see the shape of anyone…or anything. She scanned the storefront with a critical eye. The sun rising behind them was brilliant, so she could see inside. She looked back at the Hummer. “See anyone in there?”
“No,” Shaun said. “Looks clear to me.”
“Hmm.”
“You don’t trust it.” Shaun’s eyes were sunken, bloodshot, sleepless.
Kid needs some sleep, Dejah thought. We both need sleep. We need help, food, shelter, rest … and I need to get to my Selah. But now she also needed to take care of this boy. Or at the very least try to avoid getting him killed. “It seems … odd. Something’s not right about this place being shut up tight and this new Hummer sitting right in front. It’s out of place for these parts.”
Shaun shrugged. “You see people living in the barrio or ghetto like this all the time; their houses are a dump, their cars are rock star limos.”
“Hmm. Yeah, and you know all about how it is in the ghetto, right, Mr. Private School?” She raised one eyebrow at him in amusement.
He blushed and she was instantly ashamed for having ribbed him after all they’d gone through. She was just coping using humor, trying to lighten the mood. Because this just didn’t feel right.
“I’ll go first,” he said. His voice took on a deeper tone.
She didn’t know if he was trying to sound older or stronger, or if it just happened because he’d steeled his resolve. Because he’d changed so damn much even since they’d met last night. Or it seemed that way. Maybe it had all just begun to sink in, and he’d switched into survivor mode. She recalled the coyote, scavenger turned predator. They all had to change to survive. That’s a fact, Jack. “No,” she said. “We’ll both go. But I’ve got the gun, so I’ll go first.”
Dejah stepped out of the Cadillac. The wind of the morning and the warmth of the sun on her cheeks was just a cruel reminder that things would never be the same again. A hint of death on the wind was the smell of spoiled meat, of distant fires, of vanquished dreams. She took a deep breath and approached the Hummer. Shaun stepped out beside her, the duffel bag of water over his shoulder.
“Pull open the door,” she said. She posed with the gun aimed at the front driver’s seat.
Shaun reached up, intending to open the door and scramble clear. He pulled the handle. The car alarm went off. The grating sound was loud as an air raid siren. It shrieked in their ears and just about made Dejah piss her pants. Her heart raced like crazy, and she ran around to her side of the Cadillac. The alarm would alert the infected. Those infected would bring more and that was more than she could take right now. She couldn’t take a fight, a battle; she was at her wit’s end, and—
—before she got into the car, the Hummer’s alarm gave two quick beeps and went off. Silence reigned, seemingly louder than the alarm had been. She caught her breath and looked around. Her eyes wide, her finger gripped the trigger of the revolver.
“Get in the car.” Shaun hissed.
But she froze, because she saw the shape of a man in the window of Bocadomart. She couldn’t make out his features. He was a black silhouette beyond the bars. But he stood there, looking out at them. In his arms was a rifle. Pointed right at her.
“Stop right there,” she heard the man say. She trembled, the open air at her back, potential zombie attack coming any moment. She started to speak.
“Don’t move a goddamn inch,” he barked again.
This time, he obviously meant it.
CHAPTER 16
Dejah felt her pulse pounding in her throat. She didn’t dare look at Shaun, but she could see him in the periphery of her vision, frozen, like her, hands half in the air.
“L-look, mister…” Shaun stammered.
“Y’all don’t look like the damn Sickies,” the old man said. He’d opened the front door and they could see he was white-haired, weathered, skinny, and armed with a big rifle. “What the hell are you two doing out wandering around these parts? Don’t you know those Sickies are out there?”
Dejah started to say something, but the man cut her off.
“Get yer dumb asses in the store. Now!” The old guy turned around and grasped the door handle. The expression on his face stated quite clearly he was giving them about five seconds to comply and then the door would be slammed shut whether they made it inside or not.
Dejah looked at Shaun, and they ducked inside the sanctuary of the Bocadomart.
* * *
After some awkward introductions and his new visitors took in their surroundings, Frank listened to Dejah’s story, and Shaun followed with his tragic tale. Frank grunted and nodded, adding some profanity to the discussion about the new kind of Hell life had devolved into. But, for now, there was plenty to eat and drink here, and Shaun welcomed running water and plumbing again. They spent most of the day recovering.
Shaun washed as well as he could using the sink and a beach towel. Frank found him a Corona t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants to put on, while Dejah insisted on washing his socks and letting them drip dry over the towel bar. He wore som
e cheap, yellow rubber flip-flops, also blazoned with the Corona brand, while his socks dried.
Frank wasn’t overly forthcoming sharing his own story, but after Dejah and Shaun had been there for a few hours, Dejah began to pry it out of him and damned if she hadn’t charmed him soft. He told bits and pieces of the events leading up to their chance meeting. He didn’t say it, but the fact was, Dejah reminded Frank of his daughter, Holly. He grew quiet as thoughts of his daughter made him wonder if the infection had spread to the west coast. Holly was in Oregon. If it were Holly out there trying to get away from the insanity of the infection, he hoped someone would show her some kindness. Helping Dejah and Shaun was his way of paying forward, hoping Karma would provide for his girl.
“Do you have children?” Dejah asked him. Frank came out of his reverie.
“What’s that?”
“Do you have children?”
Frank nodded, smiling. “I was just thinking of my daughter. She’s quite a bit older than you. I’ve got three grandchildren too. All teenagers. Lord, help their mother.”
“She live close?”
Frank shook his head. “Nope. Up in Oregon. Hopefully, they’ve contained this infection business to Texas. I don’t know what’s going on. Haven’t heard any news for a few days now. Can’t get any radio or television.”
“Us either,” Dejah said. “You think the infection has spread nationwide?”
“No way to say, really.” Frank took a swig of his beer. “Let’s hope not.”
Shaun thumbed through a crossword puzzle magazine. He looked up from his spot on the floor. “You got a pen around here?”
“Ah, you found one in English. Good for you. Let me see….” Frank looked around the cash register. He grasped the blue plastic pen hooked to a silver ball chain glued to the counter and gave it a hard yank. The pen and chain broke free. Frank tossed it to Shaun.
Shaun laughed. “Thanks.”
“Sure.” Frank grinned.
They turned in early. Dejah and Shaun slept because they were exhausted. Frank stayed up a bit longer, drinking another beer, relishing the taste of it on his tongue. He regarded the weapon on the floor next to him, thought back to his days in Korea, but shut down those memories, because they couldn’t be trusted anymore, and even if they could, he didn’t want to go there.
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