Highway to Hell

by Max Brallier

  “Always this loud?”

  “Extra generators!”

  You nod. Then you head upstairs. Been a long day. Going to finish your drink and pour a few more.

  Click here.

  DEAD MEET

  You launch off the balls of your feet, grabbing the remote, slamming it down on the table, splintering it—then spinning, holding it to Eigle’s neck as you pull him close. Boxy and Thin One, eyes bulging, pulses visibly speeding, raise their M4 rifles.

  “You’re going to take me out of here,” you say.

  Eigle shakes his head. “I’m not.”

  Eigle snaps his boot heel up—quick for an old man—and into your groin. Heel connects with your left testicle and pain shoots through you, drops you to your knees.

  “You’ve been in a cell for fifty-eight months, John Casey,” Eigle says, spitting out your name like it’s rotten. “You’re slow and old and dumb.”

  Smiling through the pain, you say, “The name’s Jimmy El Camino . . .”

  “Interrogation room,” Eigle says.

  Clutching your balls, you watch Boxy draw his sidearm, train it on your chest, and fire. There’s no bang. Just a sharp, sucking sound of compressed gas and then a punch in your chest. A fifty-caliber tranq dart, just above your heart . . .

  You wake up on a cool, metal floor in a small room not much bigger than your cell. One door. A long glass panel on the wall—double-sided. You’ve been on the other side of that glass plenty of times. It’s the preferable side, you think.

  A metal table. Two metal chairs.

  You get to your feet.

  The tranq dart is still in your chest. Your vision is a little foggy and it feels like you’re moving through water—you guess etorphine in the dart.

  The door opens.

  A man stands there. Barely a man. No . . .

  Not a man.

  The thing wears fatigues, but they’re torn and caked with old blood. Much of its chest cavity is visible. Its muscles are atrophied to the point of nonexistence.

  Its face is cracked—a horrible, shattered thing. Much of the skin is gone, and its jaw juts out. Its hair is thin in a sad way, like someone deep into chemo. Eyes are cloudy and the pupils, irises, and scleras a murky yellow.

  It’s one of the monsters Eigle showed you on TV.

  A zombie.

  A piece of paper has been attached to its chest by way of a nail, driven through the flesh. It reads: “KILL ME. —LOVE, EIGLE.”

  The door shuts and the monster suddenly lurches toward you. Its arms spring up and it crosses the short distance near instantly. You sidestep, and it only gets one clammy hand on you—bony fingers raking your shoulder, and then you’re bringing a fist down, hard, onto the thing’s forearm. The bone cracks like balsa wood.

  You twist away—it follows you across the small room. Its mouth biting at air, teeth snapping against each other with such force that you expect them to shatter.

  You let it lunge, then sidestep, sticking your foot out like it’s a schoolyard tussle, and the monster trips. Before it hits the ground, you catch it by the back of its thinning hair—then you use that hair to slam the monster’s face into the table edge five, six, seven times.

  You drop the thing. It moans and continues biting at invisible flesh. But its head is split wide open, and its skull is visible.

  You rip the dart from your chest and bring it crashing down into the monster’s braincase. It breaks through, piercing the cerebrum.

  It stops moaning then.

  You kick it over onto its back, yank the paper from its chest, and slap the note against the double-sided glass. “That work?” you say.

  A moment later, the door opens again. Eigle stands there, saying, “It’s the Death Derby or the cell, your choice.”

  That’s no choice.

  “Death Derby,” you say.

  “Follow me.”

  And this time, you do.

  Click here.

  BULLET IN THE GUT, TROUBLE IN THE BRAIN

  Hours turn to days. Endless driving. Everything you pass broken, gray, rotted. Horses gallop, free. Lone men hitchhike. The undead stumble across America.

  Iris is buckled in beside you. Her freeze-dried body jostles back and forth as the El Camino rumbles over dirt roads, races down short sections of highway, navigates crumbling urban sprawl.

  It’s early morning and the sun is beating you down when you pass the Welcome to Texas sign.

  The pain in your side is becoming unbearable. You have it roughly bandaged with fabric and duct tape, but you can’t continue long like this: vision closing in, blackness intruding on the sharp light of the high Texas sun.

  You come to a small gas station along a thin, tree-crowded country road.

  “I’ll be back,” you say to Iris’s dead body.

  Her eyes stare out the window, vacant.

  “You want anything? Bottle of water? Snickers?”

  It appears she does not.

  “All right, I’ll just be a minute.”

  The cocktail of poison and booze and the blood loss and your festering gut flesh have you half-deranged. Three-quarters deranged, even, closing in on full-on brainsick demented. Your hands no longer feel like they’re yours—your sense of touch is distant, numb, weak. Stepping out of the El Camino feels like watching a stranger step out of the vehicle.

  The gas station is small: three pumps and a locked, bulletproof booth. Rough neighborhood, you guess. Inside the booth is a zombie, once a man, now a broken figure—all maggoty flesh and visible bone. A John Deere hat rests on its head.

  “First aid?” you say to the zombie.

  It moans and slaps a hand at the dirty glass.

  “First aid?” you repeat.

  It moans again and its teeth snap.

  “You’re not very helpful.”

  It gurgles, then smacks the window with two hands and tries to bite you through the glass, its teeth scraping against it. A tooth falls from its decayed mouth.

  “Are you laughing at me?” you say, tapping the ax blade against the window. “You shouldn’t laugh at me.”

  More gurgles. More moans.

  You sigh and walk to the side of the booth. You kick the door twice. Searing pain shoots through your gut. Another kick, more pain, and the door finally pops, thumping the zombie in the face.

  “When a customer asks you a question”—you bring the ax crashing into its face—“you should answer.”

  Savage, vicious swings of the blade. Large thrashes across the monster’s chest. Slashing limbs. Darkness crowds your vision, until you see nothing but pinpoints of light, and you keep swinging, a flurry of hacks, and then you’re stumbling back, collapsing into the corner.

  You awake to see the result of your blind fury: a pile of bloody flesh with a John Deere hat perched on top. No more body, no more human figure.

  You use the ax to help yourself to your feet. “Sorry about that. But customer service is important. Especially these days.”

  You find a first aid kit under the cash register. You tuck it beneath your arm, grab two cartons of cigarettes, and stagger back to the car, thinking, My God, I’ll soon be insane . . .

  In the passenger seat, with a pair of pliers. A long swig of whiskey and a look to the cold body beside you. “Iris, you might want to look away. This could get messy.”

  She doesn’t look away.

  “Okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  You dig the pliers into your side. It takes three attempts to get hold of the bullet, and when you finally yank it out, the blood comes in streams. You stuff fabric inside the wound and press it tight. Another swig from the flask and then, mercifully, you black out.

  When you wake, the sun is dipping behind the horizon. The pain in your side is sharp. You could sleep longer. You’d like to sleep for hours. But Iris’s body won’t allow that.

  You drive through the night in silence. No music. No Iris chitchat. Every few hours, you re-dress your wound. Blood loss is se
vere, but not yet critical.

  Undead coyotes howl occasionally. The poison mixes with the booze and mixes with the wound in your belly until you think you’re going blind.

  Texas is endless. All oranges and browns and collapsed bars with faded paint and shit-kicker boots on the front, the neon lights long since broken.

  Back roads lead you past a long string of car dealerships and restaurants plastered with the names of old Houston Oilers stars.

  You stop for gas outside the Alamo. Gunshots ring out. You sit on the hood of the El Camino and drink and watch men fire off shots from the roof of the country’s most famous mission-cum-fortress. Zombies stumble toward it and get cut down.

  You flick your cigarette butt and continue driving.

  As you cross into New Mexico, a good-sized pool of blood has formed at your feet. The El Camino’s seat is caked with it, and it cracks when you move.

  “Things aren’t looking good, Iris,” you say. “Not good at all . . .”

  The highway is clogged, forcing you onto Route 54.

  You already thought you were going clinical, and you’re near certain when you spot the towering, three-story pistachio nut on the horizon.

  “Hey, Iris, do you see that big pistachio nut?”

  You wait a moment.

  “No, huh? So I’m hallucinating now?”

  But as you drive on, you realize, no, this isn’t some cartoonish Tom and Jerry mirage. A sign marks it as the World’s Largest Pistachio Nut. It looks like a massive alien pod ship. Like some interstellar vessel became trapped here, out of space gasoline or whatever, unable to move on.

  It’s thirty feet high—the tallest structure for miles. Surrounded by almost pure nothing. You spot a small gift shop and country store.

  You pull over and step out. You need to re-dress your wound and refill the gas tank—might as well do it here, beneath the shadow of the world’s largest nut.

  “WELCOME TO PISTACHIOLAND, USA,” a voice calls out.

  You stumble back, pulling the sawed-off. You swing it around, searching for the source of the voice.

  “WELCOME TO PISTACHIOLAND, USA,” the voice repeats.

  It’s an animatronic cowboy, sitting on a wooden barrel on the porch of the gift shop. The half-grizzled, half-whining tin voice goes on—telling you all about pistachios and the history of McGinn’s Pistachio Tree Ranch.

  You step inside. In a back room, you find a first aid kit. There’s a small sewing kit for sale, which you grab as well.

  Back outside, you sit down on the porch beside the animatronic cowboy. It’s nice in the shade, and you disinfect the wound and fix yourself up. Then you drink and smoke. The cowboy tells you more about the place. And you think, Well, isn’t that perfect? Me here, at the world’s largest pistachio nut, when I may in fact be the biggest nut in the world right now.

  When you first see the smoke, you again think you’re hallucinating. Two thin columns, rising up from a yellow field, a few miles out.

  But you’re not hallucinating. They’re real. And they look like smoke signals . . .

  If you choose to examine the smoke signals, click here.

  Pedal to the metal, continue driving, hoping to outrun the poison? Click here.

  THE CIRCUS IS IN TOWN

  Iris has a point. The train will follow a safe route—and you can trail it, at least until its usefulness comes to an end.

  “All right,” you say.

  You roll through the intersection and turn, hugging I-66, following the tracks. You lose the train for a time amidst the hilly countryside, but coming into Virginia, Iris sits up and points. “Look there. The train—it’s stopped.”

  The train is just outside a town named Fork Station. Town looks to be a few dozen storefronts lining a single, long main street, encircled by a heavy chain-link fence. Zombies claw at it.

  The train horn blasts three times, then two men swing open the gate. Other men fire rifles from guard towers, holding off the monsters while the half-mile-long train enters the town at a crawl, finally gets entirely inside, and then the gates are shut again.

  Iris looks at you. You see a small hint of excitement splashed across her face. “We should check it out.”

  At the gate, you honk twice. Zombies begin to shuffle over. A guard shouts down from his wooden tower, “Reason in town?”

  Before you can respond, Iris sticks her head out the window and shouts, “What do you think? The circus!”

  “What you got to trade?” a second guard calls back. “Need to trade to enter.”

  “Well, I got this girl, here . . . ,” you call out.

  Iris ignores you.

  “We can spare a few guns,” you call up. “And some food.”

  The two guards look at each other, exchange a series of shrugs, then, at last, open the gate. You roll inside before the monsters can follow.

  A fat man with a bad sunburn directs you to a barter station. You trade two rifles and a bag of popcorn kernels for a single night’s stay in the local inn, two tickets to the circus show, a hot meal, and a half tank of gas.

  You park the car in the local garage—an old auto-repair shop—and give the keys to a pimply kid. The kid looks at the car in awe.

  “Don’t touch her,” you say. “She’s got a temper.”

  In no hurry, you and Iris stroll through Fork Station. It used to be a typical small town. Most of the houses, the Walmart, all that shit, were left outside when the fence went up.

  An old paint store is now a saloon, complete with bat-wing doors. The town hall has been turned into a large gambling hall and brothel.

  It’s mostly men in town. Some woman sell wares—blankets and scarves—from carts. You pass what was a Rite Aid—a wooden sign out front now says, Dr. Jack Brayer’s Dentistry, Oral Surgery, Bone Setting, and Adequate Haircuts.

  By the time you’ve walked the length of the main thoroughfare, the circus train is nearly unloaded. A few activities, carnival games and the like, are already up and running in a field at the edge of town. Kids scream from a run-down Tilt-A-Whirl while a generator rumbles.

  “What time’s the big show?” Iris asks a carny.

  “ ’Bout an hour ’fore the sun goes down,” he says as he unloads torches. “Don’t miss the fights. The fights are primo. Prime cut. Worth everything you bartered.”

  You spot a booth near the train, serving the carnies. A sign reads Old Grandma Till’s Homemade Whiskey.

  Grandma Till doesn’t look much more than fifty, but apparently that makes her an old grandma these days.

  “How much?” you ask, eyeing the bottles of moonshine.

  “What have you got to trade? Bullets? Tobacco? Books? Magazines?”

  You reach around behind your back, pull out a curved blade.

  Grandma Till is unimpressed. “Plenty of those around. Don’t need a blade.” She spots the sawed-off hanging from your hip. “That spread gun, though. Like that. Give you one full case for it—that’s twelve bottles, that’s a bargain.”

  You shake your head. “Can’t part with her, but this piece is good.” You reach down into your boot and pull out a small pistol. You hand it over, and Grandma Till feels the weight. “Six bottles,” she says.

  “Deal.”

  A slow-looking boy begins filling a cardboard Coca-Cola box with six bottles of Grandma Till’s moonshine. You pluck one from his hand before he can place it in and take a swig. It burns down to your balls.

  Together you and Iris walk alongside the train, past the roar of screaming children and churning rides and howling drunks.

  You hear the moaning then. It comes from a train car near the front of the convoy.

  It’s the wounded, breathless growl of a zombie. Other strange sounds, too—different from the monsters you heard back at the derby. These are ghoulish, almost exotic sounds.

  You sense danger: your stomach getting tight and the back of your neck feeling electric . . .

  If you want to see what, exactly, is inside the car, click he
re.

  If you’d rather march back to the El Camino and blow this joint, click here.

  HOLLYWOOD FOR UGLY PEOPLE

  The train passes and you continue forward, following. Iris curses you and falls back asleep, soon snoring.

  It’s early morning when you enter DC, driving down Rhode Island Avenue, rolling past abandoned military vehicles and stumbling monsters.

  You see nothing living. No raiders, no gangs.

  Zombies stagger around the White House lawn. The iron fence has been torn down in parts—in other parts, it’s bent, mangled. Two of the building’s front columns have collapsed and much of the building is now black with fire damage.

  Farther ahead, the capitol building. Windows and entrances are barred up, covered in wooden planks. You wonder if there are still people inside—senators and congressmen, holed up for half a decade. Or maybe they’re all monsters now—feasting on themselves. The thought makes you smile.

  An explosion snaps you back to attention. A missile, flying just over the roof of the El Camino, even skimming the surface, then detonating against a cherry blossom tree, filling the air with smoke and fire.

  It’s the little white Porsche driven by Lucy Lowblow—who you battled on the streets of Manhattan days ago. Smoke pours from the launch tube fixed to the Porsche’s front right fender.

  Iris curses. “Fuckin’ A, she found us.”

  “Someone radioed,” you say. “Tanner has men everywhere, Eigle told us.”

  There’s a puff of smoke and another rocket is whistling toward you. You stamp the accelerator, cutting the wheel, neck stiffening as the rocket slams into the armored rear of the El Camino, cracking metal, splitting it open. Your small armory spills out across the street, instantly lost among the zombies, leaving you with only the sawed-off, the Smith & Wesson 500 revolver, the grenade launcher, and your beloved fire ax.

  Another rocket, whooshing past the El Camino, slamming into the US Treasury building, raining concrete and fire down on the zombies beneath.

  You shift into third, fishtailing onto Pennsylvania Avenue, jumping the pedestrian walkway in front of the White House. Machine-gun fire pounds the ass end of the El Camino, the Porsche keeping pace as you charge ahead, spinning the wheel, the rusted, battered White House fence crumpling as you ram through, up onto the lawn, slamming into a zombified tourist—his body catching in the thresher.