SIX
Josh squeezes off a shot.
The blast cracks open the sky, the pigeon grain punching a divot through the forehead of the closest midget. Twenty feet away, the little rotting corpse convulses backward, banging into three other dwarfs in bloody clown face and snarling black teeth. The little zombies—as stunted and deformed as sickly gnomes—scatter sideways.
Josh takes one last glance at the surreal intruders closing in on him.
Behind the midgets, stumbling down the embankment, comes a motley assortment of dead performers. A giant strong man with a handlebar mustache and musculature torn open in bloody gouges lumbers alongside a morbidly obese female cadaver, half nude, her fat rolls dangling over her genitals, her milky eyes buried in a face as lumpy as stale dough.
Bringing up the rear, a haphazard assortment of dead carnies, freaks, and contortionists follow stupidly. Encephalitic pinheads, their tiny mouths snapping, stumble along beside ragged trapeze artists in garish sequins and gangrenous faces, followed by multiple amputees trundling along spasmodically. The pack moves in fits and starts, as feral and hungry as a school of piranhas.
Josh lurches away, vaulting across the dry creek bed in a single leap.
He scuttles up the opposite bank and plunges into the neighboring woods with the shotgun over his shoulder. There is no time to reload another shell. He can see Lilly in the distance, sprinting toward the denser trees. He catches up with her in a matter of seconds and directs her to the east.
The two of them vanish into the shadows before what remains of the Cole Brothers’ Family Circus even has a chance to stagger across the creek.
* * *
On their way back to the gas station, Josh and Lilly run into a smaller herd of deer. Josh gets lucky and bags one of the juvenile does with a single blast. The booming report echoes up across the sky—far enough from Fortnoy’s to avoid drawing attention, but close enough to lug the trophy back home—and the whitetail goes down gasping and twitching.
Lilly has trouble taking her eyes off the carcass as Josh rigs his belt around its hindquarters and drags the steaming remains nearly half a mile back to Fortnoy’s. In this Plague World, death in any context—human or animal—has taken on new implications.
That night, the mood lightens among the inhabitants of the gas station.
Josh dresses the deer in the back of the service area, in the same galvanized sinks in which they’ve been bathing, and he slaughters enough of the animal to last them weeks. He keeps the excess meat outside, in the deepening cold of the back lot, and he prepares a feast of organ meat, ribs, and belly, slow cooked in the broth of some instant chicken soup that they found in the bottom drawer of Fortnoy’s office desk, along with shavings of wild meadow garlic and nettle stems. They have some canned peaches to accompany the braised deer, and they gorge themselves.
The walkers leave them alone for most of the evening—no sign of the circus dead or any other enclave. Josh notices during dinner that Bob cannot take his eyes off Megan. The older man seems taken with the girl, and for some reason this worries Josh. For days now, Bob has been very cold and brusque toward Scott (not that the kid has noticed anything in his constant state of flakiness). Nevertheless, Josh feels the volatile chemical bonds of their little tribe being tested, stressed, altered.
Later, they sit around the woodstove and smoke Josh’s homemade cigars and share a few ounces of Bob’s whiskey stash. For the first time since leaving the tent city—perhaps since the advent of the plague—they feel almost normal. They talk of escape. They speak of desert islands and antidotes and vaccines and finding happiness and stability again. They reminisce about the things they took for granted before the plague broke out: shopping in grocery stores and playing in parks and going out for dinner and watching TV shows and reading the newspaper on Sunday mornings and going to clubs to hear live music and sitting at Starbucks and shopping at Apple stores and using Wi-Fi and getting mail through that anachronistic thing known as the postal service.
They each have their pet pleasures. Scott bemoans the extinction of good weed, and Megan longs for the days when she could hang out at her favorite bar—Nightlies in Union City—and enjoy the free cucumber shooters and shrimp skewers. Bob pines for ten-year-old bourbon the way a mother might yearn for a lost child. Lilly remembers her guilty pleasures of haunting secondhand stores and thrift shops for the perfect scarf or sweater or blouse—the days when finding cast-off clothing wasn’t a matter of survival. And Josh recalls the number of gourmet food shops he could find in the Little Five Points area of Atlanta—everything from good kimchi to rare pink truffle oil.
Either through some vagary of the wind, or perhaps the combined noise of their laughter—as well as the ticking and rattling of the woodstove—the troubling noises drifting out over the trees from the tent city go unnoticed that night for hours.
At one point—after the little dinner party breaks up and each of them finds their way back to their bedroll on the floor of the service area—Josh thinks he hears something strange echoing under the sound of the breeze tapping against the glass doors. But he simply passes it off as the wind and his imagination.
Josh offers to take the first shift, sitting watch in the front office, so he can make sure the noises are nothing. But hours go by before he hears or sees anything out of the ordinary.
The front office has a large, filthy plate-glass window across its front façade, much of the glass blocked by shelving, racks of maps and travel guides, and little pine deodorizers. The dusty merchandise blocks any sign of trouble rising up and over the distant sea of pines.
The wee hours pass, and eventually Josh dozes off in his chair.
His eyes remain shut until 4:43 A.M., at which point the first faint sound of engines coming up the hill jar him awake with a start.
* * *
Lilly stirs awake to the sound of heavy boot steps pounding through the office doorway. Sitting up against the garage wall, her ass freezing, she doesn’t notice that Bob is already awake in his tangled nest of blankets across the garage.
Sitting up and looking around the service bay, Bob Stookey apparently heard the engine noises mere seconds after they had awakened Josh out in the office. “The hell is going on?” he mumbles. “Sounds like the Indy 500 out there.”
“Everybody up,” Josh says, storming into the garage, frantically looking around the greasy floor, searching for something.
“What’s wrong?” Lilly rubs the sleep from her eyes, her heart starting to thump. “What’s going on?”
Josh comes over to her. He kneels and speaks softly yet urgently. “Something’s going down out there, vehicles moving fast, real reckless and shit—I don’t want to get caught unawares.”
She hears the roar of engines, the pinging of gravel flying. The noises are getting closer. Lilly’s mouth goes dry with panic. “Josh, what are you looking for?”
“Get dressed, babydoll, quick.” Josh glances across the room. “Bob—you see that box of .38 caliber slugs we brought back?”
Bob Stookey torques himself up to a standing position, awkwardly pulling his work trousers over his long underwear, a slice of moonlight coming through the skylight and striping his deeplylined features. “I put it over on the workbench,” he says. “What’s the deal, captain?”
Josh hurries over and grabs the box of ammo. He reaches under his lumberjack coat, pulls the .38 snubbie from his belt, flicks open the cylinder, and loads it while he talks. “Lilly, you go get the lovebirds. Bob, I’m gonna need you to get that pigeon gun of yours and meet me out front.”
“What if they’re friendly, Josh?” Lilly pulls her sweater on, steps into her muddy boots.
“Then we got nothing to worry about.” He whirls back toward the doorway. “Get moving, both of you.” He lurches out of the room.
Heart racing, flesh prickling with terror, Lilly hurries across the garage, charges through the archway, and then down the narrow aisle of the retail store. A single hanging lantern lights her way.
“You guys! Wake up!” she says after reaching the storeroom door and pounding loudly.
Shuffling noises, bare feet on cold floorboards, then the door clicks partially ajar. Megan’s drowsy, dazed face peers out on a cloud of skunk-weed smoke. “¿Qué pasa? dude—what the f*ck?”
“Get up, Megan, we got trouble.”
The girl’s face goes instantly taut and alarmed. “Walkers?”
Lilly shakes her head emphatically. “I don’t think so, unless they’ve learned how to drive cars.”
* * *
Minutes later, Lilly joins Bob and Josh out in front of Fortnoy’s—in the frigid, crystalline, predawn air—while Scott and Megan huddle behind them in the office doorway with blankets wrapped around themselves. “Oh, my God,” Lilly utters, almost to herself.
A little less than a mile away, over the crest of the neighboring trees, a vast miasma of smoke rises up and blots out the stars. The horizon behind it glows a sickly pink, and it looks as though the black ocean of pines is on fire. But Lilly knows it’s not the forest that’s burning.
“What have they done?”
“This ain’t good,” Bob murmurs, the shotgun clutched in his cold hands.
“Get back,” Josh says, thumbing the hammer back on the .38 police special.
The engine noises close in, maybe a few hundred yards away now, coming up the winding farm road—the sources of the noise still obscured behind a veil of night and the trees bordering the property—their headlights creating wildly arcing beams. Tires skid and careen through gravel. Rays of light shoot up into the sky, then across the tops of trees, then back across the road.
One of the headlights flares across the Fortnoy’s sign and Josh mutters, “What the hell is wrong with them?”
Lilly stares at the first vehicle that comes into view—a late-model sedan—swerving up the snaking gravel road, then going into a skid. “What the f*ck?”
“They ain’t stoppin’! THEY AIN’T STOPPIN’!!” Bob starts backing away from the twin beams of deadly halogen light.
The car skids into the lot, roaring out of control across the fifty yards of pea gravel bordering Fortnoy’s property, the rear end raising a thunderhead of dust in the indigo predawn chill.
“LOOK OUT!”
Josh springs into action, grabbing Lilly by the sleeve and pulling her out of harm’s way, while Bob spins toward the office and screams at the top of his lungs at the two lovers huddling wide-eyed in the open doorway.
“GET OUTTA THERE!!”
Megan yanks her stoner boyfriend out of the door and across the apron of cracked cement flanking the fuel islands. The sedan—revealing itself, as it looms closer and closer, to be a battered Cadillac DeVille—screeches and fishtails toward the building. Bob lunges toward Megan. Scott lets out a garbled cry.
Another vehicle—a battered SUV with a broken luggage carrier—comes squealing and careening into the lot. Bob grabs Megan and gently shoves her toward the soft weeds beyond the service doors. Scott dives for cover behind a Dumpster. Josh and Lilly duck behind a wreck near the front sign.
The sedan mows down the closest fuel pump and keeps going, its engine whining furiously. The other vehicle goes into a spin. Lilly watches in shock from about fifty feet away, behind the wreck, as the sedan crashes into the front window.
The sickening crunch of glass and metal makes Lilly jerk with a start. Debris and sparks go flying as the sedan penetrates the front of the building.
The car keeps going, rear wheels keening and spinning on the floor, destroying half the building with the force of a giant wrecking ball. Lilly puts her hand to her mouth. The front half of Fortnoy’s roof collapses on the sedan as it comes to rest in the retail store.
The SUV slams sideways into the diesel pump, setting the fumes alight. Fire booms upward in a sheath and licks at the rising vapors. The windows of the SUV flicker a dull yellow from something burning inside it. Lilly silently thanks God that the fuel reserves are empty, or she and her friends would be vaporized by now.
The SUV comes to rest at an angle under the awning, its high beams still shining brightly, illuminating the building like stage lights in a hallucinatory play.
For a moment, the silence crashes down on the property until the crackle of flames and the sizzle of fluids are all that can be heard.
Josh cautiously moves out from behind the wreck, still clutching his .38 revolver. Lilly joins him and is about to say something like, What the hell just happened, when she notices the headlights of the SUV are shining directly into the building, a wide pool of light falling directly on the rear of the sedan.
Inside the car’s rear window—fractured by huge starbursts of broken glass—something moves. Lilly sees the back of someone’s shoulders, slowly turning, pivoting awkwardly, revealing a pale, discolored face.
All at once, Lilly knows exactly what happened.
* * *
Moments later, things at Fortnoy’s start unraveling at a rapid rate as Josh calls out to the others in a frantic whisper. “Get away from the building!”
Across the lot, Bob, Megan, and Scott still crouch in the weeds behind the Dumpster. They slowly rise and start to answer.
“SSSSSHHHHHHHHH!!” Josh points at the building, indicating the dangers inside, and whispers loud enough to get them moving. “Hurry up! Get over here!!”
Bob understands instantly, and he takes Megan’s hand and creeps around the flickering flames of the diesel pump. Scott follows.
Lilly stands next to Josh. “What are we gonna do? All our stuff’s in there.”
The front of the station and half its interior are totaled, the sparks still sputtering, the water mains still flooding the cold floors.
In the glare of the SUV’s headlight beams, one of the sedan’s flapping rear doors suddenly creaks open wider, a decomposed leg clad in rags stepping out in fitful, spastic movements.
“The place is gone, babydoll,” Josh says under his breath. “S-O-L … forget it.”
Bob and the others join Josh and Lilly, and for a brief instant they stand there, still in shock, catching their collective breaths. Bob still clutches the shotgun in his sweaty palms. Megan looks sick. “What the f*ck happened?” she mutters almost rhetorically.
“Folks must have tried to get away,” Josh speculates. “Must’ve had a passenger that got bit, and they turned in the car.”
Inside the wrecked building, a zombie emerges from the sedan like a deformed fetus being born.
“Bob, you got your keys on ya?”
Bob looks at Josh. “They’re in the truck.”
“In the ignition?”
“Glove box.”
Josh turns to the others. “I want y’all to wait here, keep your eye on that walker, might be more in there. I’m gonna get the truck.”
Josh turns away but Lilly grabs him. “Wait! Wait!! You’re telling me we’re just gonna leave all our stuff in there, all our supplies?”
“No choice.”
He heads around the left side of the smoking pumps while the others stand there stunned and speechless. Twenty-five feet away, the SUV thumps, a half-ajar door creaking open, the firelight blooming. Lilly jerks. Megan gasps as another dead thing pushes its way out of the vehicle.
Bob fiddles a shotgun shell into the breech with shaking hands.
The others back away toward the road, Scott mumbling hysterically, “Shit, man, shit … shit … shit … shit … shit … shit … shit…”
The thing that emerges from the SUV, burned beyond recognition, staggers toward them, its mouth gaping with black drool. The back of its collar and part of its left shoulder still crackle with tiny flames, the smoke around its skull like a halo. Apparently an adult male, half the skin of its face burned off, it barely remains upright as it shuffles slowly toward the smell of humans.
Bob can’t get the shell seated properly, his shakes are so bad now.
No one sees the flare of taillights across the lot behind the row of wrecks, and no one hears the rumble of the king cab’s engine firing up or the squeal of its rear tires digging in as the engine roars.
The burning zombie approaches Megan, who turns to run and trips on a patch of loose gravel. She sprawls to the pavement as Scott cries out and Lilly tries to help her up and Bob struggles with the shotgun.
The walker gets within inches of them when the blur of metal appears.
Josh backs the Ram directly into the zombie, and the impact of the protruding trailer hitch impales the thing, sending the charred corpse flying in a cloud of sparks. The thing breaks apart in the middle, the torso flinging off one way, the lower extremities spinning in the other.
One of the blackened, sizzling organs strikes Megan in the back, splattering her with hot, oily bile and fluids. She lets out a scream.
The pickup skids to a stop next to them, and they pile in, yanking a hysterical Megan in through the back hatch. Josh floors it.
The truck barrels out of the lot and down the winding access road.
All told, a mere three and a half minutes have elapsed since the onslaught … but in that time, the destinies of all five survivors have irrevocably changed.
* * *
They decide to head down the hill and turn north, weaving through the forest toward the tent city. They proceed cautiously, with their lights off and eyes wide open. In the rear camper, Scott and Megan peer through the firewall window, while Bob and Lilly, side by side in the cab next to Josh, scan the landscape with feverish concentration. No one says a word. They all harbor the unspoken dread of investigating the extent of the damage to the tent city—the resources of the vast encampment now paramount to their survival.
By this point, dawn has broken, the edges of the horizon—pale blue behind the trees—already beginning to drive the shadows from the gullies and culverts. The air is bitter cold and scented with the char of recent fires. Josh keeps both hands on the wheel as the pickup snakes through the cool shadows rising above the tent city.
“STOP! JOSH! STOP!”
Josh stomps on the brakes at the zenith of a hill overlooking the southern edge of the camp. The pickup scrapes to a halt.
“Oh, my God.”
“Christ Almighty.”
“Let’s turn around.” Lilly chews on her fingernail, gazing through a break in the foliage. She can see what’s left of the tent city in the distance. The air reeks of burned flesh and something worse, something deathly foul, like a mass infection. “There’s nothing we can do here.”
“Hold on a second.”
“Josh—”
“What in God’s name happened down there?” Bob murmurs to nobody in particular, staring through the gap in the trees that opens like a proscenium above the meadow fifty yards below. Early-morning sunbeams shoot down through scrims of smoke, making the devastation look almost unreal, like footage from a silent movie. “Looks like Godzilla attacked the place.”
“You think somebody went crazy?” Lilly keeps staring at the smoking ruins.
“I don’t think so,” Josh says.
“You think walkers caused this?”
“I don’t know, maybe there was a big old swarm of ’em and a fire started.”
Down in the meadow, along the edges of the encampment, flaming cars sit in disarray. Scores of smaller tents still burn, sending up black gouts of smoke into the acrid sky. In the center of the field, the circus tent has been reduced to a smoldering endoskeleton of metal poles and guide wires. Even the hard-packed ground burns in places, as though someone spooned out dollops of liquid flames. Smoking bodies litter the grounds. For a brief, surreal moment, Josh is reminded of the Hindenburg disaster, the flaming debris of the airship in its catastrophic death throes.
“Josh…”
The big man turns and looks at Lilly, whose face is turned away now, scanning the edges of the forest on either side of the king cab. Her voice lowers several registers until she sounds almost groggy with terror. “Josh … um … we have to get out of here.”
“What is it?”
“Holy f*ckin’ Jesus.” Bob sees what Lilly sees, and the air in the cab crackles with tension. “Get us outta here, captain.”
“What are you—”
Then Josh sees the problem: the countless shadowy figures emerging from the trees—almost in synchronous marching order—like a vast school of fish stirred from the depths. Some of them still smolder with thin wisps of smoke leaching off their tattered rags. Others trundle along with robotic hunger, their curled claws outstretched. Hundreds and hundreds of cataract-white eyes reflect the pale light of dawn as they lock on to the lone vehicle in their midst. The hairs on Josh’s thick neck stiffen.
“JOSH, GO!”
He yanks the steering wheel and slams the pedal down, and the three hundred and sixty cubic inches roar. The truck lurches into a one-eighty, plowing through a dozen zombies and taking down a small pine in the process. The noise is incredible, the wet wrenching of dead limbs and snapping of timbers as the debris and blood kick up across the front quarter panel. The rear end wags violently, smashing into a cluster of walkers and tossing Megan and Scott around the camper. Josh pulls back onto the road and floors it, booming back down the hill in the direction from which they just came.
* * *
They barely make it to the adjacent road at the bottom of the hill before they realize at least three zombies have attached themselves, barnaclelike, to the pickup.
“Shit!” Josh sees one in his side mirror, clinging to the vehicle on the driver’s side, near the rear quarter panel, feet on the running board, tangled in strapping ropes, its tattered clothing caught in the camper’s metal trim. “Stay cool, everybody—we got some hangers-on!”
“What!” Lilly turns toward the passenger window and sees a dead face pop up across the glass like a jack-in-the-box. The face twitches and snarls at her, its inky drool flagging in the wind. Lilly lets out a startled gasp.
Josh concentrates on the road, making a wild turn, then heading north at a steady forty-five miles an hour, moving toward the main two-lane, purposely swerving in an attempt to fling the zombies off the pickup.
Two of the walkers have clamped on to the driver’s side, one on the passenger side—and they hold fast—either caught on the truck, or strong enough in their spastic hunger to hold on. “Bob! You got any more of them shells in the cab?”
“They’re in the back!”
“Shit!”
Bob shoots a glance at Lilly. “Darlin,’ I believe there’s a crowbar on the floor behind the passenger seat—”
The truck swerves. One of the walkers tears free, tumbling to the road and pinwheeling down an embankment. Muffled screams come from the back. The sound of glass breaking comes through the wall. Lilly finds the greasy three-foot length of iron with the hooked end on the rear floor. “Found it!”
“Give it to me, honey!”
Josh looks out at the side mirror and sees a second zombie slip free of its mooring and fall to the rushing pavement beneath the wheels. The truck bumps over the corpse and keeps barreling.
Bob hollers in his gravelly wheeze, twisting around toward the sleeper window, raising the crowbar. “Get back, Lilly, cover your face!”
Lilly cowers, shielding herself, as Bob strikes out at the zombie in the window.
The curved end of the crowbar slams against the window but merely chips a divot out of the reinforced safety glass. The zombie snarls, tangled in bungee cords—its toneless growl a Doppler echo on the wind.
Bob lets out a cry and then slams the crowbar into the window again and again, as hard as he can, until the curved tip breaks through the safety glass and plunges into the dead face. Lilly turns away.
The crowbar impales the cadaver through the roof of its mouth and gets stuck. Bob gapes in horror. Behind the mosaic of fractured glass the skewered head hangs suspended in the wind for a moment, the dull glow behind its sharklike button eyes still animated, the mouth still pulsing around the iron as if trying to eat the crowbar.
Lilly can’t look. She presses back against the corner, shaking convulsively.
Josh swerves again, and the zombie finally tears loose in the wind, falling to the pavement and vanishing under the wheels. The rest of the window blows away, a tissue of shattered glass imploding and swirling into the cab. Bob flinches, awash in adrenaline, and Josh keeps barreling forward as Lilly curls into a fetal position in back.
They finally reach the main access road and Josh heads south, picking up speed, calling out loud enough for the folks in the back to hear: “Everybody hold on!”
Without another word, Josh accelerates, hands welded to the steering wheel, weaving and lurching around pockets of wrecked, abandoned vehicles for another couple of miles, keeping an eye on the side mirror, making sure they are clear and safely out of range of the swarm.
* * *
They put five miles between them and the cataclysm before Josh applies the brakes and stops on the gravel shoulder of a deserted stretch of rural wasteland. The silence that descends on the truck is unreal. Only the sound of their heartbeats in their ears and the high, lonesome whistle of the wind can be heard.
Josh glances over his shoulder at Lilly. The look on her faintly bruised face, the way she’s curled up in the corner of the floor, hugging her bended knees against her chest, shivering as though suffering from hypothermia—all of it worries him. “You okay, babydoll?”
Lilly manages to swallow the lump of terror in her throat and gives him a look. “Just peachy.”
Josh gives her a nod, then hollers loud enough to be heard back in the camper. “Everybody okay back there?”
Megan’s face in the window says it all. Her ruddy features screwed up with nervous tension, she grudgingly gives them a noncommittal thumbs-up.
Josh turns and gazes through the windshield. He breathes hard, as though recovering from a sprint. “Damn things are definitely multiplying.”
Bob rubs his face, breathing hard, fighting the shakes. “Getting more brazen, too, you ask me.”
After a pause Josh says, “Must’ve happened fast.”
“Yeah.”
“Poor bastards didn’t know what hit ’em.”
“Yeah.” Bob wipes his mouth. “Maybe we oughtta go back, try and draw them things away from the camp.”
“What for?”
Bob chews the inside of his cheek. “I don’t know … could be survivors.”
Another long pause hangs in the cab, until Lilly finally says, “Not likely, Bob.”
“Could be supplies left over we could use.”
“Too risky,” Josh says, scanning the landscape. “Where the hell are we, anyway?”
Bob roots a map out of a cluttered door pocket. He unfolds it with shaking hands and traces his nail across the tiny capillaries of unmarked farm roads. He still labors to catch his breath. “Best I can tell, we’re somewhere south of Oakland—tobacco country.” He tries to hold the map steady in his shaking hands. “Road we’re on ain’t on the map—at least it ain’t on this map.”
Josh stares into the distance. The morning sun hammers down on the narrow two-lane. The unmarked road, which is fringed in weeds and littered with an abandoned wreck every twenty yards or so, snakes along a plateau between two tobacco farms. On either side of the unmarked two-lane, the fields have overgrown with neglect, the weeds and kudzu twining up the slats of weather-beaten guardrails. The shaggy, ramshackle nature of the fields reflects the months that have transpired since the plague broke out.
Bob folds up the map. “What now?”
Josh shrugs. “Ain’t seen a farmhouse for miles, seems like we’re far enough out in the boonies to avoid another swarm of them things.”
Lilly climbs back onto the bench. “What are you thinking, Josh?”
He puts the truck into drive. “I’m thinking we keep heading south.”
“Why south?”
“For one, we’ll be moving away from the population centers.”
“And…?”
“And maybe, if we keep movin’ … we can keep the cold weather in our rearview.”
He gives it some gas and starts to pull back onto the road when Bob grabs his arm.
“Not so fast, captain.”
Josh stops the truck. “What is it now?”
“Don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news.” Bob points at the gas gauge. “But I just put the last drops of my reserves in her last night.”
The needle is riding just below E.