by Ponce, Jen
We slowed when we neared the loading bay and then Dan peered around the corner. He yanked his head back, face pale. “One on the ground. Jude, I think. Paisley and Isaac are on the other side of the fence.”
“How did he make it?” Jean breathed.
“I don’t know.” He grabbed her by the arm when she moved to look. “You don’t want to see. Let’s get over the fence here where they can’t see us and wait for Evan.”
“What about all this stuff?”
Dan shrugged. “We have what’s in the backpacks. Is the rest worth our lives?”
“It might be once it starts snowing,” Jean said.
We went over the fence, my fingers protesting as the wire bit into them. My tennis shoes kept slipping out of the small holes in the chain link, and it took way too long to climb. Once at the top, the pole sagged and the flesh of my palm got pinched all to hell between the pole and a bit of wire. I bit down on the yelp of pain, then let myself drop the rest of the way to the ground, hand throbbing.
We headed straight back for several hundred yards, circling around the gigantic water tower nearby, putting it between us and the crazies that filled the store’s parking lot. Evan came hauling ass up the hill, swerving in toward Jude and Paisley, who jumped in the bed. Jean stepped into the road and waved her arms until he noticed her and then we were safely in the pickup, too.
He made a Y turn and headed back to the main road. To our right, the zombies pressed against the fence, fingers poking through the wire, mouths pressed up against it. I couldn’t see Jude’s body, there were too many of them. I wondered how they’d gotten him and not Isaac, when Isaac had been the one to go out first.
I wished we hadn’t stopped at the damned store, now that I knew the cost of our visit.
“Where did we plan to meet? To the north, right?” Evan asked. “They’ll be north, right?”
“Yes,” I said, my heart stuck firmly in my throat. Lana had gotten away, I knew that. She’d driven away honking, trying to rescue us. They were fine. Lana was fine.
I twisted and opened the window to yell back at Isaac and Paisley. “Are you guys okay?”
Isaac’s arms were wrapped around his knees and he didn’t answer or look at me. Paisley nodded, swiping tears away with her shirt sleeve. There was blood on the cuff, and I wondered if she was hiding a bite. People in zombie movies always hid bites. All it took was one guy deciding to pretend like nothing had happened to wipe out the whole crew.
I made a mental note to keep an eye on her and Isaac. Just in case.
We passed a gas station on our right—no van. A trailer park further up on our right. A bank on our left. No van. Dan was running his hand through his hair every five seconds, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was rubbing at his face, shifting in his seat. Every once in a while, I could hear him say, “Come on, Owen.”
Come on, Lana.
We passed some sort of ag business on our right then slowed when we came on a semi-truck tipped over on its side. Hundreds of knobby, round sugar beets were spilled everywhere and our tires bumped and crunched over them as we eased past. Further on, a car rested wheels-up in the ditch, a zombie trapped beneath. It reached for us, pleaded with us to, “Come back! Please!” but we kept on. I tried to imagine what Lana would have been thinking. Why come this far? She knew the plan. She wouldn’t have had to come this far to stop safely, would she?
“We’re too far out of town. We must have missed them,” Dan said, clearly on the same track I was on.
“You want to go back into that mess?” Evan asked. “I thought we agreed that we’d wait outside of town to the north.”
“Maybe there’s another way north,” I suggested. “Or maybe this way was blocked when they tried it. I don’t know—” My words trailed off and my mouth went dry when I saw the van up ahead. It was parked diagonally across the road, the sliding side door open. A trail of blood smeared across the road.
Nothing living was in sight.
“Nononono,” Dan moaned. “No!” He slammed his hand on the door then opened it even though we were still moving. “Let me the fuck out!” The truck hadn’t even stopped before he was launching himself out, tripping and almost spilling to the pavement.
I saw the zombies in the cornfield ahead and everything inside me shriveled up. “Oh goddess.” I gripped the door handle but couldn’t make myself pull on it, couldn’t make myself get out.
“Owen!” Dan shouted, his voice as desperate as I’d ever heard it. “Baby! Come here! Daddy’s here! Please!”
He sounds like one of them, I thought. Like I had back there at the store. No way Owen would come to him. Not after his mother …
I stumbled out of the truck and lifted my gun, stomach churning. They had heard Dan and were coming for us and the gun barrel shook as I stared at them, wondering when I would see Lana’s face, when I would hear her plead with me to help her.
“Help me!” one of them called, and goosebumps broke out over my flesh. Not Lana’s voice.
“Help!” another chimed in, this one a child. Not Owen. I couldn’t remember Evan’s and Jean’s girls’ names, but this wasn’t a girl anyway, so it didn’t matter. It wasn’t them.
“I’m okay,” a third one said. “Okay! Okay! Okay enough for what it’s worth. Okay!”
They were like broken dolls, their batteries corroded, their memory chips rusted, stuck on a word or a phrase, never to speak sensibly again.
They were dolls, I told myself, not people. Never people. Not anymore.
27
Now
Her time driving on the interstate comes to an abrupt end. A semi lay jackknifed across the road in front of her. On the other side, there are cars piled up in the road in a long, tangled mess. People who had tried to get out of the city, she supposes. Most of the doors stand open. There are bodies everywhere and she has no idea if they’re really dead or just waiting.
She doesn’t want to find out.
She finds an entrance ramp and takes it, then makes her slow and halting way southwest. If only that damn semi driver had kept their shit together … She huffs out a breath and then slows.
There are monsters everywhere. They sit, they stand, they clump in bunches and just stare at each other with dead eyes. Dead eyes that come to life when they spot her. There is no way in hell she’s getting past them and as soon as she’s enough into the city, they will surround her car, force her to stop with their sheer numbers and then they will get in and eat her.
She should have known she wouldn’t make it. She should have known the city would be impassable but she had hope, damn it. The hope that she would find her boys had stayed with her through all these hellish days.
She sits in her car with the engine idling, as she stares at the crowds of them in the roadway ahead. Too many to crash through—Dan told Ivy that, so long ago. No way to drive around. If she backtracks, she’ll get farther away, and she doesn’t think she can afford the detour. Who knows what else she’ll run into if she does?
She watches as they notice her, as heads turn, as the calls start up, broken and rotten though they are. She watches and cries helpless tears.
When those tears dry, because they don’t last long, of course they don’t, she’s seen too much to indulge in tears anymore, she studies the area again. She needs a distraction, a big one. She needs explosions. She needs their attention to be directed somewhere else. She needs them to move away long enough for her to drive through.
She has a helluva long way to go and no way of knowing what she’ll find when she gets there, but she has to try.
So, explosion.
There’s a gas station in her rearview. She may even be able to get to it if she lures the crowd ahead away with her horn.
As she drives slowly to the left, honking as she goes, she considers how hard it might be to cause an explosion. Perhaps it will be something as simple as spilling some gas on the ground and hoping things catch fire. She’ll have to move fast, not only because she doesn�
��t want to get caught up in what will hopefully be a big boom, but because they will come for her once they spot her.
“Go in, try the pumps for power. Spill gas. Light it. Come back here. Wait. Drive in the opposite direction.” Get caught farther on because an explosion here won’t make a damn bit of difference later. “Shit.”
Still. She can drive fast. Ish. As fast as she dares, as the roads allow.
And if there’s a blocked road? And they fall in behind you?
The boys. She has to get to the boys. Which means she has to try even if it kills her.
So, explosion.
The crowds are thick behind her and she accelerates, leaving them behind. She cuts around and around again until she’s back where she started. There are still a few zombies remaining, but not enough to stop her from driving past. She honks as she cruises by, picking up more zombies to lure away, studying the pumps as she does. Without power, she won’t be able to get any gas out of them, so her first thought—pumping gas onto the ground and lighting it—is already dead in the water.
One of them steps out in front of her, holding his hands out to her in supplication. “Elp! Elp, elp!”
She jerks the wheel to the left, clips the man with her bumper. The crunch of bone and flesh is horrific, but it doesn’t make her cringe like it used to. As she straightens the truck, she catches sight of a line of colorful lids set in small humps in the ground. Right. The delivery trucks add the gas directly to the underground tanks. If she can get one of those lids off and drop something with a flame down there she might be able to get the distraction she’s looking for.
She just has to figure out how to do that without getting exploded herself.
She thinks about the supplies she has in the SUV. Extra gas, sure. Clothes. Tools. Food. If only she had a fuse, a long, cartoonish one …
There’s rope. She has rope.
She leads the dead things away and circles back, then shuts off the engine and takes a good long look around her, taking her time, unwilling to make any mistakes now. She doesn’t see any of them, so she gets out, leaving her door open so she doesn’t have to worry about the sound. She lifts the back hatch and rummages through her things, pausing to take in her surroundings so she doesn’t get sneaked up on.
The longest rope is about twenty feet in length, but she isn’t sure how far it will need to drop into the tank to do any good, so she takes all three back to the cab of the SUV and carefully knots them together. When that’s done, she gets back out, gets a bucket and puts the rope in it, leaving a small tail out to grab. She pours some of her stored gas on the rest, soaking the rope, making her eyes water from the fumes. She secures the lid as best she can, leaving part of the rope hanging free, and places the bucket on the floor in the passenger side.
It’ll be a miracle if she makes it without spilling any.
It’ll be a miracle if she manages to get away from the gas station without being burned alive. Or eaten.
Goddess, she does not want to be eaten.
She makes her way down to the gas station, heart hammering. There aren’t any of them here, at least not yet. She parks and gets out, remembering a time when she had people watching her back. Now she has to crane her head every which way, hoping to hell she sees them before they see her.
She doesn’t know how easy the lids come off, but after a quick turn and a yank, it lifts away from the hole.
What if there’s no more gas?
What if the rope won’t burn?
What if one of them gets her before …
“Stop,” she whispers and gets the bucket.
One of them has noticed her, though it doesn’t seem too spry. It’s sitting against the brick wall of a laundromat half a block away, and it tries now to get its feet underneath it to stand but its muscles don’t seem to be cooperating. It reaches for her, hungry, desperate. She hopes it can’t sing. She hopes its killer ripped its throat out.
She lifts off the lid of the bucket, nearly gagging at the fumes, and pulls the rope free of the gas. She realizes she should have left both ends free and curses herself, then drags the wet rope out of the bucket with shaking hands, hoping she doesn’t set herself on fire when she flicks the lighter.
Once it’s on the ground, she runs back to the wet end and nudges it toward the hole with her boot. It finally slithers into the dark space and more of it follows as she guides it. After half of it disappears, she stretches it out again, getting her a good forty yards from the hole. She takes another long look around and sees three more of them headed her way. The laundromat one still hasn’t figured out how to stand, but the three coming at her are shambling right along.
“Fuck.”
She gets out her lighter, hands shaking and stretches toward the rope, her boots well back. It lights, catches, goes out. Lights, catches, goes out.
Another glance. They’re closer, their hands reaching, reaching, their fingers itching to dig into her skin, to separate her muscles from her bones. Their teeth gnash and these remind her of good old-fashioned movie zombies.
Until they open their mouths and ruin it.
“Mom? You? Mom, help. You?” says the only guy in the bunch. Half of his scalp hangs off his skull, hiding one of his eyes. This doesn’t seem to bother him as he churns toward her.
“Georgie Porgie puddin’ pie,” rasps the older one, “kiss the girls, the girlsgirlsgirls.”
She drops the lighter on the rope, the flame still burning, and gets into the SUV. She can’t stay there any longer. They’ll be on her with their hungry eyes and grasping mouths.
With a bitter sort of anger, she puts her vehicle into drive and stomps on the gas, rushing at them with a growling scream that doesn’t quite sound like her at all.
At the last minute she swerves, clipping the ‘girlsgirlsgirls’ zombie with the right bumper and sending her flying into the others. “Spare!” she says in that same not-so-sane voice and drives back up the hill.
She’s almost to the top when there’s a strange whump of sound, a sound so loud it doesn’t even register as sound but as a vibration.
The SUV jounces slightly as the blast wave rushes past and she turns to see a black clap of smoke rise up from the now merrily blazing station.
It worked.
She watches as the zombies rise, turning their decayed, death-blasted faces to the orange ball of flame like rotted sunflowers in an abandoned field.
It worked.
She slams her hand down onto the steering wheel in exultation, then gets the SUV turned around while the zombies move toward the flames. “I’m coming, boys. Goddess damn it, I’m coming.”
28
Now
She gets a mile down the road before the zombies get thick again. She drives around several groups of them, most standing as still as statues until they hear the SUV’s motor. They call out, of course, and bring others, until she needs another explosion to distract them. No more rope, though, and so she honks, leading them away.
At this rate, she’ll have to find a safe spot to fill up with gas again. She has plenty with her, thankfully, but it won’t do her any good if one of them get her while she glugs it in. One of these trips around the block might end up being her last. Every time she takes a detour, she risks running into a crowd ahead of her too. So far she’s been lucky.
“Only a matter of time.” Knowing she’s being nihilistic but unable to help herself, she ponders how she’ll die. Will she starve, trapped in the SUV? Kill herself before the teeth snap down on her flesh? Crash?
She isn’t driving fast enough to crash.
Lurid red paint catches her eye. “Survivors! REI. 7th Ave NW. Safety. Food. Water.”
At first, she doesn’t even register the message, though someone climbed up the billboard to spray paint it there. When it finally dawns on her what it is, what it means, she stares at it for a long time.
The dead things are catching up to her, the crowds are bad and she’s tired. So tired.
Will they
still be there? The survivors with the food and water? Does she dare hope?
She accelerates, dodging the cars left in the roadway, and heads in the direction of the large red arrow painted underneath the words. She thinks she may have shopped at the REI down here a few years ago. The boys loved all the camping gear—survival gear they’d insisted on calling it. They’d wanted everything, all the knives, bows, arrows, tents, sleeping bags, filter straws. She still remembers them making lists as they drove home that day and plans to do extra mowing jobs to save money so they could buy what they needed to survive.
She swallows back the tears that threaten. “Survive, boys. I know you have. I know it.”
There’s another sign, another arrow. It guides her into a parking lot that has been made into a maze with cars and arrows showing her the way to safety.
Please let it be true. Though she kind of hopes they’re gone. She doesn’t want to watch anyone else die and that’s what happens in this world now. People die. Horribly.
She shuts off the SUV and watches the store. The front has been boarded up, though signs welcome her in cheery red letters. “There’s a door to the right as you face the store. Knock three times. Once. Three times. Stay vigilant.”
She grabs her pack, her weapons, and after another long look around, gets out. She goes to the door and knocks as instructed.
Silence greets her.
She does it again. Maybe they’re on the roof. Maybe they are busy.
Maybe they are dead.
She does it one more time, wondering why she is doing this instead of hunting for her sons.
Because they’re everywhere. Because she’s tired and she needs a safe place to sleep so she doesn’t get herself killed.
She waits and waits, her hope sinking.
Not here though. They’re dead.
She steps back, wondering if she can sleep in the car. It’s quiet here, almost as if someone has been making sure they don’t get in. Shooting them if they do. It won’t be comfortable, but that’s okay.