by Bobby Adair
The gasping beasts blew a mist of red through moos that sounded more and more like cries.
And my foot was still on the brakes slowing the car to a baby crawl, a speed that would tempt any predator.
The red light still glowed on the trees.
Whites stopped and looked away from their prey, surprised by the red glow. They apparently took just as long as I did to wrap their virus-addled brains around the same conclusion I was getting to: I was about five seconds from being totally fucked.
Chapter 3
I slammed the brake pedal down. The Mustang jerked and the tires chirped as they bounced and skidded. Just to make sure that I had the attention of every fucking White in the road.
Not really. I was startled by the noise and primal violence on the road in front of me. Instinctively, my emotions were revving up to full-blown scared shitless.
I wasn’t thinking.
The car lurched to a stop. I pushed the shifter into reverse, and the white reverse lights on the rear of the car illuminated the trees and bushes in a much brighter hue.
It was like I was trying to get every one of the white fuckers to notice me. The only stupid thing I didn’t do was lean on the horn.
I mashed the accelerator all the way to the floor, and the car rocketed backward on the kind of instant acceleration that only electric motors with a flood of amps pouring through them can deliver.
Still in liquid slow time, I realized that poor Fritz should have followed my seatbelt example—harness really—when he'd gotten in. Whereas I was buckled in tight, he was thrown against the dashboard, and his skull pounded a spider web of cracks across the glass, leaving a bloody smear.
When I cut the wheels and slammed the brakes again, having warp-drive jumped across a few hundred yards, Fritz’s limp body rolled back into the passenger seat, and his weapon, keychain flashlight, and map tumbled to the floorboard. Blood poured a red river over his face from the wound on his forehead.
Shit.
I hoped he was okay. But I’m a pragmatic fucker when I start to get my head cleared out, even while the shit is flying. Whatever damage I’d done wasn’t going to get undone with hope and worry.
The car spun as it came to a stop. I hadn’t managed to turn it all the way around, but I turned the wheels and got the Mustang straightened in the road before Murphy had reversed the Humvee more than a few more car lengths in the other direction.
I looked out the Mustang’s back window and got a quick glimpse of cattle trying to escape the mauling, while hundreds of Whites chased my red brake lights.
In front of me, Murphy maneuvered the Humvee into a lumbering Y-turn, spinning up gravel on the shoulder as he urged the heavy, armored vehicle to move.
The Whites behind me closed the gap.
I recalled how I’d been caught in that Humvee in front of the hospital back in August, with what seemed like a million infected screamers surrounding me. I’d lost control of my Humvee then. It was only through luck or answers to hasty prayers that I made it out.
As Murphy's Humvee plodded, I imagined all the Whites I couldn't see, running toward us at full speed from out in the fields on the other side of the trees. If enough of them surrounded the Humvee, our little expedition to College Station would have an unpleasant end.
“Fuck!” None of us is going to make it.
At least that was my thought, because I was still stuck in flight mode. I needed to reset and take control. It was time to put some dents in my fine electric machine and waste some Whites.
Reaching over and grabbing Fritz's collar to hold him steady, I put the Mustang back in reverse. Taking a half second to be careful, I accelerated the Mustang backward at the chasing Whites.
Some of them stopped. Many of them slowed. The stupid, aggressive ones kept after me at full speed.
And I knew—at least, I did all I could to convince myself—that no matter how many Whites got in front of the Mustang, I had enough power under my hood to burrow through. I only hoped the car would hold together when it came to that.
The Mustang lurched with the shock of the first White I plowed over. He went under the car, as I guess his knees buckled with the impact of the bumper. A second, third, and fourth went down.
Whites were beside me by then. I mashed the brakes hard to stop.
They grabbed at the car as I spun the wheels. The Mustang caught some traction, and the g-force pushed me into my seat. All the infected who’d managed to grab on either let go or lost their fingers as a gap instantly formed.
Up ahead, Murphy had gotten the Humvee straightened out on the road and was rolling toward our escape when I drove up beside him. I goosed the Mustang and zipped out front. I needed to be in the lead again, not just because of the Mustang’s stealth, but because I needed to find a place to stop and look after Fritz, and I didn't want Murphy driving off into the countryside without noticing.
We only needed to get away from the naked horde first.
Chapter 4
Drooling and mumbling, as if through a dream, Fritz blinked disorientation and blood out of his eyes as he tried to figure out what was happening.
At least he wasn’t dead, though, with all the blood, I wasn't going to put a bet on his longevity.
On the crest of the hill’s roll, with a view of a mile or more in all directions, I brought the Mustang to a stop. A stand of trees crowded the road on one side, growing through a fence and filling a ditch. A billboard with its paper ads peeling away in layers under the gaze of bulbless lamps stood on warped pine creosote poles. A quarter mile down the slope in front of us, two neglected houses reigned over one-acre homesteads, sharing an artificial pond in between.
I studied those two houses through my night vision goggles, looking for Whites in the dim moonlight, expecting them to be there, just knowing that at any minute, those insufferable white monsters would come tumbling out the windows, running out from under the sagging roof of the squat barn, or pouring out from behind a row of round bales of hay.
Nothing moved.
My breathing slowed from adrenaline-driven, hyperventilated gasps to something in the vicinity of normal. I clicked the release on my harness, pulled it over my shoulders, swung the Mustang’s door open and got out in the middle of the road. Through habit more than thought, my machete found its way into my right hand, and the pistol filled my other. If any Whites were hiding close enough to come at me, they were going to die while their goldfish brains were still trying to formulate the complex emotion of surprise.
That thought turned my scowl into a narrow, wicked smile.
I hated running.
I liked killing.
Murphy rolled the Humvee up behind the Mustang. He and Grace looked at me through the glass.
I liked killing?
Did I really? Was that a nasty truth I’d been hiding from myself beneath layers of conflicted emotions, because it was such a reprehensible desire? To like killing, to crave it, maybe, what would that say about what kind of man I was down at my core?
Or did I need to kill because I was halfway fucked in the head, and killing Whites offered a perverse exorcism of the monsters that lived in my thoughts?
Jazz, Grace, and Murphy all got out of the Humvee, examining everything nearby for a danger that might lurk there. Gabe got out last, glanced at the Mustang and then at me, a question stuck in his open mouth.
Pointing at the car, I said, “Fritz got hurt.” I put my fingers on my forehead. “He’s bleeding pretty bad.”
Gabe’s face showed his alarm.
I said, “He bumped his head on the window when I was driving crazy. He’s conscious now, but he was out until just about the time we pulled up here.”
Gabe ran to the passenger side of the Mustang.
Murphy stepped up close to me. “Is he going to be okay?”
“I think so,” I said, as I looked back at Gabe.
“How’d it happen?” Murphy asked. “Did one of those Whites come through the window?”
“He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.” I slowly shook my head as I thought it through. Maybe the seatbelt seemed like a no-brainer necessity to me because I’d been in the car before with the pedal all the way to the floor. “I should have made him do it when we got in.”
Jazz jogged over to the Mustang, and Grace walked up beside Murphy and me. She asked about Fritz. I quickly explained again.
“Head wounds bleed a lot,” she said. “It might not be as bad as it looks.”
That was good news and did a lot to assuage the tinge of guilt I was feeling.
“What’s the plan?” she asked. “Move him back to the Humvee?”
I nodded.
“You need to be careful with that thing,” she said, pointing at the Mustang.
I ignored the directive and refrained from saying ‘You’re not my mother.’ I don’t know where the temptation to say immature shit like that comes from, but sometimes it seems like such a good idea.
“He knows all the clear roads to get us to College Station,” she said.
“I’m sure Gabe knows too,” I told her. “Besides, Fritz has a map. It’s in the Mustang on the floor. It’ll have the roads marked that are passable. All we’ll need to do is avoid the horde wherever they happen to be. We’ll be fine.”
“I’ll ride shotgun in the Mustang, then.” Grace looked at me, challenging me to disagree.
I shrugged. I frankly didn’t care who was navigating, as long as somebody was.
Gabe had Fritz out of the Mustang and on his feet. Together with Jazz, they guided him slowly toward the Humvee.
Murphy looked around, taking pause as he studied each shadow, a habit of the living.
I looked out across the fields, scanning for Whites, especially looking for a gang of them coming out of the trees, or the whole horde coming over the last hill we passed. Grace started talking, and the syllables sounded like unimportant monkey noises, because I was still hung up on the idea of killing for pleasure, if that was the right word for it.
Zed, the killer. The idea had a cobweb stickiness to it that wouldn't let go of my other thoughts, and I wasn't entirely sure I wanted it to. It's as if, in those gossamer tendrils, a truth, something much more profound, hid from me.
On their own, my feet carried me along the peeling double yellow line that traced the road’s center. Grace’s useless noise faded away from my ears. The sounds of the others busying themselves with Fritz became part of the night’s background.
Some significant answer was waiting for me in my subconscious thoughts. Somehow, the stark sky and the empty night were making it easier to get close to.
And I needed to find it.
Chapter 5
I suppose I had been standing in the middle of the road for a minute, or two, or maybe an hour. The world of my thoughts obeys no clock’s arbitrary segmentation of time.
I found myself appreciating the exquisite blanket of an ink sky, dotted with pinprick stars and cast aglow in a faint silver from a thin crescent moon.
Shadows moved all around me under swaying trees and around the tall weeds. Crisp brown leaves crackled against one another as gusts rolled over the unharvested crops.
In the calm that came from stopping to listen for the first time in months, I knew no Whites were near. We were all, for the moment, safe.
I felt like I was thinking clearly for the first time in a good, long while. Yet, as much as I indulged the meditative moment, I was fully aware of the others. Fritz was in the Humvee, conscious, but dazed and bleeding where the glass had split the skin on his forehead. Murphy was conversing tensely with Grace, who was asking questions, most of which sounded like some version of how crazy was I, and why was I off standing in the middle of the road, a good distance from the vehicles?
They didn’t know.
Neither was I sure.
I only knew that I had shit to get together.
Shit I needed to get together, or I was going to stay on the path I was on, and I was going to end up dead. And Murphy was going to be dead, too. And probably some of the others.
As I ruminated, I understood with more and more clarity that I needed to do something significant to break the cycle of habit I was in: imagine something stupid, do something stupid, run, kill, repeat.
Even as I realized that, I convinced myself that my habit was itself the key to breaking it. And I imagined a solution that I knew conflated all the shit at the roots of my bad choices. The epiphany of it all was in knowing my solution might very well be a lie, and accepting that as okay.
It was a lie I knew I could tell myself enough times to believe.
Hell, why not?
A person is nothing if not the product of the lies he believes about himself. And if I believed that, why couldn’t I consciously select the specific lies that were going to define me?
Why the fuck not?
I shrugged in response to the conversation in my head.
I slipped the Hello Kitty backpack’s straps off my shoulders and let it drop to the asphalt. I lay my machete on the road and then took off my belt and holster. Each layer of clothing fell away until I was naked.
The voices behind me stopped talking.
I knew what they were thinking.
It didn’t matter.
I had problems to fix. Being ostracized from our little social circle wasn’t a worry that blipped on my radar.
“What are you doing, man?” Murphy asked from a few steps behind me.
I gave him a glance over my shoulder. His weapon was in his hands, ready for use. I turned toward the night and answered, “What I have to do.”
“What’s that?” His voice put his worry on full display.
I bent over and picked up the knife I’d taken from Mr. Mays’ house a few months prior. I tested the blade on my thumb. I kept the edge as razor sharp as I had time to. I ran a hand over the crop of short hair on my scalp. It wasn’t long enough yet to yank out again. I raised the knife, laid the sharp edge at the hairline on my forehead and scraped backward.
“Bald was never a good look on you,” Murphy said, with a fake laugh.
I shrugged. At least this time, someone was paying attention to the gesture.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“Don’t make me explain it,” I said. “You guys take the cars.” I pointed down at my backpack and clothes. “And my stuff. I’ll meet you in College Station.”
“I will make you explain it,” Murphy told me. “We need to see if one of these little towns has a drugstore. I need to check your temperature.”
I laughed.
“Why’s that funny?”
“You don’t need to check temperature to know that somebody is a White. You just have to look at them.” I turned to Murphy. “You only have to look to know the crazy ones. You know that.” I didn’t believe the lie I was going to tell, but in time I knew I was going to make myself believe it. “I can tell, too, just by looking.”
Murphy nodded but kind of shook his head at the same time.
Murphy saw through the lie for the same reason I knew I was lying. We’d both killed Whites by the score, but we’d both also killed Slow Burns, and I knew I'd killed docile ones like Russell. I’d done so because I’d made the choice to live each time uncertainty arose. I always chose to kill rather than chance my death.
Did that make me bad?
Did the karmic scales of the deaths of the good and the bad balance out?
I dropped a big clump of short hairs and watched them spread through the breeze as they fell. I dragged the knife across my scalp and scraped another stripe bald.
“I don’t know what’s up with you,” said Murphy. “You’re not a White. You’re not one of them.”
“Back after Mark killed Amber…” I choked on the words. Damn those emotions. "I think I lost it for a while there."
“All that Tarzan shit at the hospital?”
“That and more.” I stopped to collect my thoughts into sentences that I h
oped wouldn’t leave me sounding insane. “I wanted to find Mark and kill him. I wanted to make him suffer. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted anything so badly. It was like all the evil in the world, all the fucked-up shit that ever happened to me, had found its focus in him, and I knew if I could just strangle the life out of him, see his eyes bulge, feel his last breath on my face, I thought…”
“What?” Murphy asked. “That maybe revenge would make you something you're not? That it might fix something?"
I nodded.
“It doesn’t.”
I turned away and scraped another row of hair off my head. My scalp was turning slick with blood from my poor barber job. "You told me that story of those three gangbangers you killed. I know you say you found a way to get right with it eventually. You felt like you were a bad person for a long time. Do you ever wonder if killing them was a necessary step in the transformation of the lesser Murphy into who you are today?”
“I…” Murphy lost his way through whatever argument was formulating in his head.
“I know you’re afraid to answer,” I told him. "You think I'm baiting you into agreeing with me, but I'm not. You had to find your way through life to get to where you are now." I looked at his face to see if I could read his feelings about what I was saying. “I need to do the same. I told myself after Amber’s death that revenge was a stupid, selfish endeavor. Now, and every day since Steph died, I can’t get past the thought that if I’d figured out how to find that bald-headed fuck and kill him, she might still be alive.”
Shaking his head vigorously, Murphy said, “You didn’t even see Mark there that night when Steph was killed. “All we saw were a bunch of dumb Whites. That’s it. You don’t even know he’s alive. Is that what you’re talking about, here? You’re just going to run around Texas with your dong hanging out until you find a bald-headed White that looks enough like Mark that you can kill him and feel good about yourself?”