by Ponce, Jen
“We’ll get out of town today.” I pulled up Google maps and checked the distance. “1658.6 miles. So, only twenty-five hours. Easy peasy,” I said, keeping my tone light. It had taken us hours to go mere blocks last night, but perhaps today would be different. I tried not to think of the roadblock, of the man the police had shot, about Rod, or Tonia downstairs who had lost her boyfriend and her son. “We should get on the road as soon as possible.”
“What if they won’t let us out?”
“They can’t block every road.” I study the map on my small screen, wishing I had brought my tablet with me. I’d left it because I hadn’t figured I’d have time to use it. Between sightseeing and enjoying the alone time with Lana, I had hoped to be too busy for anything else. “We could go south some, see if we can get out by heading toward Lincoln. Or …” I spread my fingers, zooming in on the map. “We could go north, head to this town called Blair? It’s small and it’s in the right direction.”
“Have they texted back yet?” she asked instead of making a choice.
“No.” I’d been waiting for the notification chime too. At least we could still text them. The phone lines weren’t working though. I thumbed off the noise of the ‘all circuits are busy’ lady and sighed. “We should go.”
“What about Tonia and her aunt?”
I shrugged. We could offer to take them with us, but I didn’t think Tonia would say yes and anyway, I wasn’t sure how we’d get a woman in a wheelchair safely out of the house and into the SUV. “We can ask. They probably have a car though.” We hadn’t seen inside the garage after all.
“We’ll need food.”
“We’ll get some. We can take water with us, too. I’m sure they’ll let us take some water. It looked like there was a small bag of recycling in the kitchen, plastic bottles and stuff. We could wash and fill those.”
Lana nodded. “Will you ask while I go to the bathroom? Then we go.”
“Got it, boss.”
We went downstairs and I knocked gently on the door I’d seen Tonia disappear behind. She answered it, her eyes red and puffy. “I’m sorry to bother you … Lana and I are going to leave soon. Did you want us to take you guys somewhere?”
She shook her head, a frown forming. “Radio said to stay put.”
“I know, but we have kids—older kids with our parents—that we need to get back to and a long road to get there. We need to go as soon as we can.”
“You should stay put.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’m scared for my boys.” I didn’t want to say more, didn’t want to shove it in her face that my boys were alive while hers were dead but it hit her anyway.
She sank into herself, her arms going around her middle as if I’d punched her. “Yeah, I get it.”
“Can we—?” I didn’t get the rest of the words out because she shut the door in my face.
When I joined Lana in the kitchen, she raised her eyebrows. “Well?”
I gave her the rundown and she sighed. “It’s so awful. I wish we could ease her pain.”
“Me too.” I grabbed the sack and eased open the knot, then put the bottles we could use on the counter.
“She didn’t say we could?” Lana asked.
“Nope. But since it was in a trash bag, I’m going to assume they won’t mind.” We washed them well in warm, soapy water, and then filled them with fresh water from the tap. I put them in grocery sacks I found stashed in a homemade bag hanging on the back door and set them by the side door. I looked out at the street. It was quiet, nothing moving, no cars. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it was a sleepy Sunday morning.
“All’s clear,” I said when I returned to the kitchen. “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
“It was clear out there when I looked,” I said, but we stood at the window and watched the street for a good ten minutes before we ventured outside.
Lana had written them a note and placed it on the kitchen table, a thank you note and condolences. They were beautiful words and I hoped Tonia would find some comfort in them.
We checked the backseat before we got in, then shut the doors and locked them, the water bottles stashed in the back. I plugged my phone into the charger that had been in the SUV when we took it and then sat there for a moment realizing I was about to leave town in a car that wasn’t mine.
“Is this how our kids feel when they play Grand Theft Auto?” I asked as I put our stolen—appropriated—vehicle into reverse.
“We aren’t planning on dooring prostitutes and drug dealers, are we?”
“If they start singing kids song and screaming they’re hungry, we might be.” I drove in the opposite direction of the way we’d come last night. No point going back and risk being seen by the blockade. We needed to get out of town, which meant we had to keep from getting caught up in a military roundup or quarantine.
We came across one of them a few minutes later.
She was standing in the middle of the street, her hand clasping what looked like a TV remote. Her other arm was a bloody mess of bites. She turned when she heard us and we saw she was crying. “Please stop. I need help. Please!” Her hand lifted, the one that held the remote, and she reached for us, but her fingers didn’t spread and she didn’t drop it. That sent shivers down my spine for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. Maybe it wasn’t a remote. Maybe it was something more important, something she needed.
“Should we stop?”
“You listened to the broadcast too, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Lana’s hand found mine. “She looks terrified.”
“I know.”
We drove past slowly, cringing as the girl wailed at us, for us.
“Why do some of them sing and some of them cry?” Lana asked when we’d put the girl behind us.
I shook my head, unsure, then something occurred to me. “I think some of them act as bait and some of them act like flushers on a hunt.”
“Flushers?”
“They make noise and scare game out of hiding. I think maybe that’s how these things work. The singing ones scare us, making us run. The others lure us in with pleas to our emotions, making us easier to catch.”
Lana had her phone in her hands before I could suggest it, tapping words out furiously. When she was done she stared at the screen as if willing the boys to text back. The notification made us both perk up. “They said they’ve heard people crying and calling but they haven’t gone out. Jackson almost opened the door for one of them.” Lana had to stop, overcome by the same wash of terror I felt. “Tucker talked him out of it. Said he was being horror-movie dumb.” Her sob-laugh made me smile through my own need to cry. “Oh god. Who knew video games and horror movies would save them?”
“They did. Every time they argued to be allowed to watch one or buy one.”
She texted back to them, telling them we loved them, and telling them to continue to use their video game smarts to stay safe. “They said we need to remember to be smart too and to text them with questions if we get into a jam.” She covered her mouth. Her tears spilled over her hand to plop onto the screen.
“It’s okay. It’ll be okay,” I murmured, though I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.
9
Then
It still didn’t seem real, even when we had to backtrack because of a pileup or because too many of them were in the road. They didn’t always follow the car as movie zombies would. They weren’t dumb killing machines taking after any old thing they heard hoping it would be something to eat. They were smart, or at least smarter than the monsters my boys’ movies had promised we’d see during the apocalypse.
“How the hell are we going to make it across the country if it’s all like this?” Lana asked, her eyes on the small crowd of them on the doorstep of a duplex. Two of them stood outside, calling out someone’s name. Another stood outside a window holding up a little girl no more than four. The girl was screaming, and a man’s face appeared out the second-stor
y window, mouth open, arms reaching.
I braked, though I didn’t know what we were going to do to save either of them. Who the hell knew if the little girl was one of them or if she was bait.
Maybe she was both.
“We have to do something.”
“Dee, no. You’ll die and we won’t get back to the boys.”
I rolled the window a crack, unable to look away, wanting to hear, wanting to see if I could figure out the truth, figure out what the fuck to do.
The girl screamed when the one holding her shook her little body. “Daddy!”
“Asha! Please, let her go. Let my baby go. I’m begging you, please.”
“Asha, please!” the one holding her cried, then the rest of them tittered and cawed, a horror-show laugh track.
“Hang on,” I said.
Lana had time to say, “What—” before I cranked the wheel and stomped on the gas. We bucked up over the curb and slammed through the crowd to the left of the girl and her captor. I slammed my hand down on the horn, then put the car in reverse and backed up far enough to see who was still standing.
Several of the ones I hit twitched on the ground, limbs twisted, flattened. A few got up despite their injuries, injuries that would have kept a normal human writhing on the ground in pain.
“This isn’t going to do any good,” Lana gasped. She gripped the Oh Shit handle hard, her eyes wider than I’d ever seen them. “How will we grab her?”
“I don’t know.” I peered up at the second-story window to see if the dad was still there, but the space was empty. Maybe he’d thought we were trying to run over his little girl and was coming to save her.
If he left the house now, he’d die.
“What if we drove close enough for you to grab the girl through the window? Like you roll it down just enough to grip her coat and then we drive off. You’d have to hang onto her tight, Lana. You can’t let go or she’s toast. But you have to keep your hands free too.”
“Oh, God. I don’t know.”
One of them slapped their hands on our hood. Another poked her fingers through my cracked window and I was glad I hadn’t rolled it down any further.
“Lana? They’re getting up and soon there will be more of them.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, her fist at her lips as if she were kissing a rosary. I guessed old habits died hard and, like the dead, rose again in the apocalypse. “Okay. Go.”
“One try. If you snag her, okay. If not, I don’t know what else we can do.”
She rolled down the window as I aimed us at the man, cutting to the left of him so Lana could reach out and grab. Her arm went around the girl’s legs and she screamed as Lana pulled, as the man yanked back. I goosed the gas a bit, just enough to give Lana some leverage and the man lost his grip. Lana lunged further out the window, trying to get her arm up high enough so the girl wouldn’t fall, and the girl flipped out, kicking, screaming, flailing. I stopped the car and leaned over to help Lana pull her in.
The bite on her knee was an ugly purple.
Lana grunted, trying to readjust her grip. “I can’t hold her, she’s just—”
“Drop her! She’s been bitten!”
I heard the father yell out, “No!” but I couldn’t turn around. The girl gripped Lana’s coat sleeve with dirty fingers, jerking her body not to get away from my wife but to turn her head far enough to sink her teeth into her.
“Drop her? No, I—” Lana screamed when the girl bucked, wriggling her little body further into the car, her little mouth working, her growl a thing of pure horror.
Another scream, cut off. I didn’t turn though I knew they were probably coming for us now because they had one of their own in the car with us. Lana had reversed her motions, was trying to shove the little monster out the window, Lana’s cries products of her terror. I yanked my hand back twice to avoid those teeth, then managed to get a grip on her curly blond hair while Lana shoved her legs. As soon as her bodyweight shifted, she fell out of sight.
I pushed the window button and got us the hell out of there.
The little girl’s dad was under a dogpile of them.
We didn’t talk for a good long while.
“We can’t do that again.” Lana’s voice shook, the tears evident in her watery words.
“Save people?” My incredulity must have been plain because she snapped around.
“Yes. We’ll end up dead. And our boys will never know what happened to us. It’s not fair to them. Not fair at all and I’ll be damned if I sit here …” She gasped, tears overwhelming her for a minute. When she caught her breath again, she said, “I’ll be damned if I watch you get torn apart doing a good fucking deed. Do you hear me?”
The entirety of the apocalypse heard her, but I wisely kept my mouth shut.
10
Now
It’s snowing. At first it’s just a few fat flakes, the kind their boys liked to catch with their tongues. It blankets the world and hides the ugly bits, hiding them with fairy magic. Soon, though, the weather changes and what was magic becomes danger. She is a hundred miles down the road from the old woman with the brush. A hundred miles closer to home but she has to stop again so she doesn’t wreck.
She’s gone through too much not to make it. If she dies now, it will have all been for nothing.
Her insignificance overwhelms her and she slows while she cries, while the world around her turns whiter and whiter, while time and death and distance do their best to bury her.
When she is able to concentrate again on things outside, the snow has eased. Her borrowed vehicle hums quietly in the middle of the interstate, its engine faithfully pumping hot air into the cab. She presses the button on the GPS and a woman’s chirrupy voice advises her it’s five miles until the next exit.
She’ll look for a farmhouse, one with a fireplace. Maybe she’ll get lucky and there will be food. Her stomach growls as if to say it thinks this is a good idea. Maybe she can have something hot. In a blizzard, they won’t be out. Some will be frozen. Others will be hiding in houses, waiting.
She hates them, the hiders. They are everything she feared as a little kid worried about monsters in the dark, monsters under her bed.
She will use the gun this time. It makes her feel brave, its weight, and in a storm its report will be muffled, maybe, or scattered. She doesn’t care if its neither at this point because now her stomach and her brain are determined she will get a hot meal and one that she doesn’t have to crouch in a corner in the dark to eat.
She turns off the interstate onto a two-lane highway that goes on for a few hundred feet. A left and another left and she’s in a small compound of farm buildings. A garage, a house, another house, a chicken coop. So many places for them to hide. But she has the gun, she reminds herself.
She has to dig through the pack to find it, then she pats her knife to make sure it’s on her hip. She does this out of habit, out of self-preservation. It’s a talisman against the biting, hungry things that wait for her out there.
Her stomach cramps at the thought of getting out of the SUV, of being vulnerable, and she has to breathe through it. When the pain in her stomach is gone, she does her best to set the fear away, far away. She can’t let it overwhelm her if she wants to get into the house. Not if she wants to survive.
She leaves her pack in the car and gets out, locking the door by hand before easing it shut. They can open doors when they’re fresh and having one surprise her later is not on her list of shit she wants to deal with ever.
The wind is biting and drives sharp needles of snow into her cheeks. She thinks it’s March and knew even before she tried that it would be a crap shoot going over the Rockies so close to winter. Hell, she remembers news stories of snow blocking the passes in June. But she couldn’t wait until June. She hadn’t wanted to wait until March but …
She grips the gun and waits even though the wind hurts her skin. They are patient so she has to be patient too.
It becomes a game. They hi
de. The human waits. They watch. The human watches. Until one of them makes a mistake.
Guess which one almost always makes the mistake?
She has learned these things whether she wanted to or not and now she forces herself to stand in the snow that pelts her so she doesn’t lose the game.
There. A shadow in the window. Just a tiny movement but she spots it because by god she stayed still. Her heart ramps up but she doesn’t move. Let them wonder. Let them ache for food and become greedy at the thought of all her warm flesh out here for the taking.
For the biting.
For the rending.
How will they get to her? How old are they? Will they be stiff from the cold? Or have they retained enough of their humanity to know to put on warm clothes?
“You.” The word is a sigh in the wind and she isn’t sure she hears it until it comes again. It’s deep like a man’s voice. She doesn’t move because he’s given up the element of surprise but she hasn’t. He probably heard the car’s tires squeak-crunch through the snow. He knows someone is here and his hunger will flush him out.
The car is at her back but she checks behind her anyway, trying to keep the fear from pushing her into a mistake that could cost her her life. Something could be crawling under the car at you right now, says the fear. Something could run at you from that coop.
Her stomach roils but she stands her ground and waits.
Maybe she will freeze out here, turn into a block of ice. Would they consider her a treat? A fleshcicle? Forty-something flavored. High in fear hormones and grief.
Yes. They’d think her delicious.
“You come.” The voice is closer. She can’t see where he is but he’s outside now. It’s a good sign he’s not talking in complete sentences. He’s an older one, which means he’ll be less fleet of foot. That, combined with the cold, means she might survive another encounter with them, another day of this hell.
“Pretty lady.”
If it’s possible for her to get any colder, she does. This voice is higher, louder, and more articulate.