"Shit, that's Claire and Pete's Benz," Jessica said as she looked at the cars. She put the truck in park and popped out onto the street. "Stay inside. I'm gonna see if anybody's hurt."
"Mom, don't," Belle said.
Jessica walked up to the black Mercedes station wagon and looked in through the open driver's side door. It was empty, the air bags deflated. There was luggage still in the back and a small black clutch purse sat on the middle of the front seat. She moved away from the Benz and around a Toyota Prius that was crumpled under the nose of a Ford pick-up, the eco-car's front windshield shattered by the truck's bumper, a white air bag dangling from the steering wheel.
A cocker spaniel was wedged under the front passenger side wheel of the truck, and Jessica wondered if the crash had been caused by someone trying to avoid hitting the dog. She looked around at the nearby houses of the neighborhood: all was quiet. Nobody was in any of the cars and the chirping of birds mingled with the hush of the breeze.
And then she heard a weird stutter-thumping on the pavement and turned to see five blood-stained people skip-hopping toward her. Lurching, almost, but attempting to run. Their arms pumping, spittle foaming out of their mouths, their faces a mixture of rage and intense concentration. It took another moment for her to realize they were coming for her, not toward her before she started running to her own idling vehicle. She could see Belle's look of incomprehension as Jessica closed on the car, her daughter's eyes wide and flitting between her and the group behind her. Jessica banged into the side of the door, yanked it open and slid inside.
Moments later, the five deadened people slammed into the side of the car and began pawing at it. The electric locks slammed down as Belle hit the button.
Jessica turned and regarded her daughter. "Good idea."
One of the men on the outside pulled at the handle on Jessica's side, jerking it violently and leaning his head against the window, his face filled with rage, spittle flecking the glass, bloody drool pooling out of the corners of his mouth. His left arm looked dislocated and his clothes were soaked in a mixture of mucus and vomit.
"Mom! Drive!" Belle shouted as a pair of twenty-something women pounded at the passenger side door her daughter was staring through.
The truck peeled out, spinning the infected assault group to the pavement as each lost whatever grip it had on the vehicle. Jessica drove across the lawn of a house, snapping a mailbox off at the base before losing control of the truck as it jumped over the curb on the end of the lawn and skidded sideways across the street, slamming into a UPS truck sidled up to the curb.
Jessica's head banged into the window. She rubbed it for a moment, trying to regain her wits. What was going on in the world? She turned and looked at Belle, who was staring through the various windows, her head swiveling quickly.
"Mom, they're coming after us, we've got to go," Belle said, careening to look over her shoulder. "Mom! Go!"
Jessica turned her head and looked through the rear window at the five-some she had just left, each of them again skip-running toward her vehicle. She took her foot off the brake and touched the gas pedal gently, easing the truck forward, not wanting to panic and floor it again. She drove through the neighborhood slowly, alert for other panicky motorists and new groups of infected individuals, unsure of which to be more fearful.
The drive down Colt Road chilled the blood in her veins and let her know that not everyone had remained calm in their homes to wait for the authorities to deal with the situation. The shops in the strip malls near the intersection with Spring Creek Parkway were all busted open, the parking lots littered with abandoned burnt cars and a scattering of bodies. The Wal-Mart Super Center bled smoke into the sky. Belle turned the car radio on and tuned through the stations, all of them set to the emergency broadcast outgoing message.
"This is the emergency broadcast station. All citizens are urged to remain in their homes during the outbreak of influenza in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth region. The virus is highly contagious and causes those infected to become extremely aggressive and dangerous. Remain calm and indoors until local officials contact your neighborhood with the all-clear and tune to this station for further updates. This is the emergency broadcast station."
It was the same message on every station, a message as vague and unhelpful as could be.
"They give better updates for thunderstorm warnings," Jessica said absently.
"What's going on, Mom?" Belle asked.
"I don't know, honey, I don't know," Jessica said, steering her way around a car crash and onto the parkway. "Let's just get to your dad's and figure things out."
The intersection with Highway 289 was a nightmare littered with smashed vehicles. Jessica pulled the Land Cruiser over to the side of the highway and stared at the mass of cars, suddenly unsure about whether it would be smart to try to drive around the dead vehicles and down the roadway. The parkway she was on had been lightly traveled for the short distance she'd been on it, and she'd seen almost no traffic in the neighborhoods before then.
Everyone, it seemed, was bugging out of town at the same time. Probably, she thought, since yesterday or the day before, and she wondered how long some of the people on the highway had been sitting in the traffic jam, going nowhere, slowly.
"Let's see if the Dallas Parkway is any better," Jessica said, steering around an abandoned car and back onto the road.
"It's going to be like this everywhere, Mom," Belle said. "We should go the back roads."
"We might have to, but let's just check and see first."
It was even worse there. Tractor-trailers were jackknifed in the intersection. Sedans and hatchbacks were crumpled into each other like lovers embracing in their final moments. Four-wheel drive trucks and SUVs were abandoned in the fields around the gigantic intersection. A recreational vehicle was upended onto its rear end, the front windshield pointed to the sky, its tires all blown out, a pair of police cruisers crunched nearby.
And everywhere, bodies.
"Jesus Christ, the world is ending," Jessica said. She looked up into the sky at the scud clouds moving quickly beneath the high gray overcast.
There was an explosion of glass behind her and the Land Cruiser was suddenly catapulted forward, the tires squealing for a brief moment against the pavement before Jessica's body jerked against the seatbelt and her foot slipped off the brake pedal. The world moved in slow motion, and Jessica watched as an abandoned mini-van spun across her windshield and T-boned the nose of her truck, the quick pop of the airbag suddenly cushioning her as the truck settled into the mini-van.
For a moment, she was confused, the punch of the airbag having knocked the sense out of her. But as the air seeped out of the fabric she found the brake pedal and moved the gear lever into park. She looked over at Belle, a bead of blood forming at the base of her left nostril, her eyes focused on infinity.
"Belle, are you okay?"
Belle's head lolled for a moment and she rubbed her palm over her forehead, blinking reality into place, trying to recognize the world around her.
"Belle?"
Belle nodded slowly. "I'm okay, Mom."
Jessica looked quickly through the rear window of the Land Cruiser and saw a smashed up yellow Ford Mustang near the spot she had just been in, a thin line of white smoke oozing from the beneath the bent-up hood. She slipped out of the truck and stood in the intersection and regarded the damaged car: how had the driver hit her? She was sitting in the middle of the road in plain sight. She walked toward it and the driver's side door creaked open, a twenty-ish man with long thin blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail and a wispy mustache staggered out of the vehicle. He was pale, ghostly, and his eyes turned uncertainly in his head, as if they were not capable of fixing on reality. He moaned and turned his head to look up into the sky, his head wobbly as if he were drunk.
"Are you okay?" Jessica said, taking a few small steps in the man's direction, just enough to make sure her voice traveled the distance between them.
"Help me," he said softly, his voice thick as if his tongue were swollen.
He tried another step and bent down to the ground, holding himself steady with a palm on the asphalt. He made a desperate little pitchy noise in his throat, a gasp of accepting his fate, and curled onto the ground. Jessica turned in place, staring at the tableaux of devastation around her: this is how the world ends?
Belle popped out of the truck and stared at the mash of vehicles in the lanes of the intersection, then looked to Jessica with a bewildered expression. "Now what do we do?"
Jessica wanted to shrug, wanted someone else to tell her what the next step was, but the world provided only an approaching green Subaru that slowed to a stop a hundred yards shy of the intersection and turned around, driving away.
"We gotta get a new car," Jessica said, eyeing the Enterprise Rent-A-Car sign in a parking lot on the north side of the interchange. She looked at the Land Cruiser and thought of the supplies in it and shook her head. "Get your backpack, honey."
They walked off the highway and into the parking lot of the rental agency. Everything appeared in place, as if in the final moments of order and clarity in the world, nobody had thought about needing to rent a car. Where would you return it to after the apocalypse ended, Jessica thought, and smiled. The door to the office was locked, but Jessica smashed the glass pane with a rock and undid the bolt from the inside, unafraid there might be an armed employee of some sort waiting inside. Everyone had abandoned their posts and fled in the last few days, but judging from the major roadways, few had made it far.
"Try and find the keys," Jessica said. "I don't care to what; we'll drive anything."
After several minutes, Belle pulled open a cabinet door and stared at a collection of keys on pegs, each with a small laminated paper tag attached.
"Found 'em, Mom."
"Grab one."
"We really don't care?"
"No, honey," Jessica said, "just grab a set and we'll walk through the lot clicking the clicker until we hear a horn. We don't have time to find anything specific; we need to get out of here."
Walking through the parking lot, Jessica felt relief. Soon, they'd have a new set of wheels and a new plan to drive on the back roads as much as possible, at least until out of the urban network. And they'd retrieved a half-case of bottled water from a back room in the rental agency, a boon to replace some of what they'd had to abandon in the Land Cruiser. Not that they'd need much for the two hour drive to Lake Bridgeport, but it was nice to have. Ken would be proud of her situational awareness. Jessica clicked the button in her palm again and a horn sounded two short blasts off to her right. She turned her head and saw the parking lights blinking on a Nissan Altima. She smiled at her daughter.
And then frowned at what she saw in the background. The sound of the horn had alerted a pair of overweight, jeans-and-flannel shirts-clad bearded truckers that she and Belle were there. At least, what else could have caused them to suddenly stand up from behind a row of cars and turn around until their glazed-over eyes pointed at her and her daughter? The two men began shuffling toward her, a relentlessness to their motion. They were nowhere near as fast as the crowd in the intersection a while earlier, but they were no less fixated on her.
She pulled her backpack off and rustled the pistol out of the front pocket. The two walkers were still 40 yards away, way outside her shooting ability. Shit, she thought, if only she'd let Ken take her to the range any of the times he'd tried. But she'd lost interest in Ken by the time he'd given her the pistol, and spending "quality time" with him - shooting pistols, Scrabble-playing or drunken fucking - had become something she'd avoided. Now, when a monthly trip to the range would've come in useful, she found herself staring through the sight of the pistol trying to remember what Ken had told her about shooting and wondering what Bob Crighton had ever brought to her life. Orgasms, but she'd had those off-and-on, depending on the guy, since losing her virginity to Walter Stubbs at a party in her junior year of high school. She had never understood why orgasms were so important to men.
She squeezed the trigger at what she figured was just inside twenty-five yards. Missed. Shit. The two truckers lurched forward drunkenly, assuredly. She put the sight on the middle of the left-one's chest, remembering something Ken had told her about “center mass,” breathed in, paused, exhaled slowly and pulled the trigger. The zombie staggered back, coughed up some blood, and shook its head as if it had been poorly insulted at a cocktail party. And then came toward her. She sighted on the zombie’s head and fired again, missing. They were now inside twenty yards. She fired again and missed.
“Shit,” she said, holding the pistol at full arms length and sighting again on the undead man’s head.
She pulled the trigger back again and heard a click.
Empty.
Fuck.
She'd forgotten to reload the magazine. She rummaged through the bag and quickly realized she had forgotten to bring the spare magazine or the box of bullets. She stared at the gun in disbelief, a lump of metal, now. Useless.
"Mom, we gotta go," said Belle from behind her, her voice chock-full of fear.
Jessica nodded and stood up, dropping the gun into the bag and zippering it quickly. "Let's get to the car, quick."
She turned to look for the Altima as Belle started walking when Jessica heard a weird slapping off to her left: a skip-hopping rage-faced twenty-something man in a torn-apart blue business suit, a yellow tie cinched way too tightly against his neck at an angle that suggested it had been wrenched by someone. Fifty yards behind him a gaggle of slow-moving shufflers were moving toward her. She dropped the bag and sprinted a dozen steps directly into a rental agency clerk covered with blood, mucus oozing from his mouth. She bounced off of him and the key clicker went skittering across the asphalt as she spun her arms wildly to regain her balance and remain upright.
Jessica could see Belle turn at just that moment. The look on her daughter's face was pure horror, her eyes wide, her mouth forming an O.
"The key," Jessica shouted, and saw the movement of her daughter's eyes as Belle caught sight of it sliding on the asphalt toward her, but nowhere near her.
The rental agent groaned something and stepped toward Jessica when she was hit from behind and wrapped up like a Dallas Cowboys quarterback getting tackled in the backfield by a Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker who had correctly gauged the snap count. The air burst from Jessica with a gasp and she could feel the bite of teeth on the back of her neck as she was pushed into the side of a gray sedan.
"Mom! No!" were the last words she ever heard as her face was pressed against the driver's side window and she stared into the car at the steering wheel and dashboard, her left arm suddenly pulled out of its socket as another pair of teeth tore into her.
She felt warm wetness spreading over her shoulders and down her chest and back, could hear the grunted rage of her attackers as they bit into her again. A moment later her legs were lifted up and her jeans were being shredded from her body. She knew she was moments from death and something in her made her stop struggling and wait for it. She thought of Belle for a moment, a flash of an instant really, praying Belle had gotten the key and was driving away, then momentarily remembering holding Belle on her chest moments after she was born, how happy that day had been. Then she remembered meeting Ken for the very first time at a tailgate party before an OU-Texas football game, drinking beer and laughing with him. He seemed so easy-natured then, so full of confidence and optimism that she spent the entire day with him. And then most of the rest of her life.
Those were a good memories.
The War on Horror
Atlanta, Georgia - Day 274
Chief Petty Officer Daryl “Sandman” Grecich floated down beneath his parachute, his eyes scanning the ground of
the Druid Hills Golf Club below him. He'd seen the video footage, read the intelligence reports, knew everything there was to know about what to expect when he and his team hit the ground, but still didn't believe it. On the other hand, he was glad to not still be in Afghanistan, where it had suddenly seemed that the war on terror had lost its meaning. The jihadis he had been killing had given up fighting months earlier, retreating into their compounds and caves shortly after the United States closed its borders to everything.
It had taken Grecich and most everyone else in the military in Afghanistan by surprise when the US government announced it was closing its borders, and that included to them, too. Higher command had assured the troops there was plenty of food, ammunition and other supplies to stay without worry for many months, but Grecich figured that’s exactly what the higher-ups would say. Thousands of miles from home, surrounded by Islamist radicals, no reinforcements and no recall to home port. Grecich figured he and his men were as good as dead. But then the local jihadis gave up on fighting them, retreating to their caves or melting into the civilian population, ending their guerrilla warfare. Another SEAL team captured a jihadi a few weeks later and it turned out the Islamists thought Allah was finally punishing the West for its sins, so they were content to wait it out and see what God's Plague made of the infidels.
The men in Fire Base Coldstream did nothing for months. Patrolling yielded no actionable intelligence, and there was precious little information filtered down from above. According to the news, a highly infectious contagion was spreading the globe through every means available and turning people into something that resembled zombies, although most news reports simply called them “the infected.” Grecich’s commander figured they were probably in as good spot as any to wait it out, seeing as Afghanistan was still stuck in pre-history and infected people weren’t likely to travel there.
Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse Page 13