by Jeremy Dyson
The truck hops over the curb and onto the street, and then Joey swerves left towards the courthouse. The rims start to grind against the pavement. At least one of the tires is flat, and we are half a mile to the courthouse. I think the truck can make it, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Somehow when we get to the parking garage, we have to find another car, or we’re screwed.
The undead alongside the road notice the noise of our vehicle approaching. They lurch into the street, reaching for the truck as we pass. Dead bodies lie strewn across the road like speed bumps. Some have tread marks on their clothes from vehicles crushing them once or twice. They drag their mangled bodies through the streets. Joey weaves between them when possible, but rolls over them when necessary. I cringe at the sound of their bones cracking beneath the vehicle.
Joey swerves to avoid an abandoned blue Volvo station wagon parked sideways in the middle of the road. As we pass, I notice someone sit up in the drivers seat. I turn and look back to see the window roll down enough for a hand to stick out and wave at us. Whoever that was in there, they were alive. I think about telling Joey to stop and go back, but I don’t. Our car is full, and one of our tires is flat. We can’t risk stopping, not for anything.
The courthouse is a few hundred yards ahead, but a long line of abandoned cars blocks the entrance. There are only a few wrecks in the opposite lane, so Joey cuts across, driving over broken glass and blood stains. Joey takes a hard right back through the cars and clips the front end of a cherry red Porsche to squeeze into the entrance.
Dead bodies in orange jumpsuits with their hands cuffed together wander around outside the courthouse. Maybe this won’t be so difficult after all. Joey cuts a right turn into the first floor of the parking garage. There are plenty of parked cars up and down the aisles. Most of the owners never made it out to them.
“What now?” asks Quentin. “Should we just start checking doors?”
“Keep driving around,” I tell Joey. “Find a dead cop to run over.”
“Oh man,” Joey says. He turns the truck, following the signs on the ceiling toward the next level of parking. “Do you even realize how crazy that sounds?”
As we turn up the incline to the second level, the running lights of the truck shine on a corpse wearing a police uniform. The cop crouches over the body of a man in, what used to be, a nice suit. Joey puts his foot on the brake and stops the truck.
“Do it,” I urge him.
Joey punches the gas and I shut my eyes and wait for the inevitable sound of metal crushing bone. When I open my eyes, I see blood splattered across the windshield. Joey slams his foot on the brake. Quentin is the first one to jump out of the car. He walks over to a female corpse crawling between two parked cars alongside us and fires off two rounds. The sound is like explosives in the confines of the concrete parking structure. It won’t take long before we have a lot of company in here.
I get out and head back to the body of the cop. Danielle, Dom, and Joey start to get out of the truck, but I tell Joey to keep it running and stay behind the wheel. I don’t want to abandon the truck until I know we have another vehicle.
“Hurry up,” urges Quentin. He looks up and down the aisle of the parking garage, then reaches down and retrieves a purse from the ground and dumps the contents out on the cement.
I kneel down next to the uniformed body. The knees of my pants quickly soak in the puddle of blood. I try to ignore the bloody mess that used to be the head of a human being while I slide the gun from the holster. Then I start digging through his pockets. My hands close around a clump of hard plastic and ridged metal.
“Got them,” I say.
Bright yellow lights flash in my peripheral vision. I look up and see Quentin clicking the remote key that unlocks a silver Mercedes-Benz M-Class SUV parked a few feet away. I punch the buttons on the keys I took off the cop, and a squad car back down on the first level chirps in response. When I turn my head to look at Quentin, I notice half a dozen corpses are at the bottom of the ramp, making their way up towards us.
“We’ll take the Benz,” I tell Quentin. “We can get the squad car on the way out.”
Quentin gets behind the wheel, and I wave the others over from the security truck. Quentin steers the SUV up the incline, loops around the second level, then follows the signs back down to the first floor. The walking dead that pursued us are halfway up the adjacent incline. They turn when they see our car heading down the next row and follow us back down to the first level. I hit the remote start on the car keys I took from the cop.
“I see it,” Quentin points to a handful of squad cars parked in a row. Only one of the police units has illuminated taillights. He brings the SUV to a rolling stop. I hop out the door and dash the four or five steps to the cruiser. I reach for the handle but stop to duck when I hear a gunshot. I look back to see Quentin leaning out the SUV window and pointing the gun at a corpse that collapses in front of the Mercedes.
The dead are swarming toward the parking garage now. As soon as I open the door of the police cruiser, Quentin hits the gas again. The SUV barrels through a pair of dead cops that flail at the windows.
I throw the squad car in reverse and back it out of the garage. The crowd of walking dead proves too dense to weave the vehicle through, especially backward. I can only watch as several corpses vanish under the trunk. The wheels rumble over the bodies and jostle me in the seat. Once I am out in the entry drive, I throw the car in gear and press the gas pedal down to the floor. The powerful engine pushes me back in the seat. I catch up to the Mercedes as they reach the main street and hook a left.
We speed passed the gridlock of abandoned cars. My hands are slick with sweat and shaking as they hold the steering wheel. I try to take a deep breath to calm my nerves, but the adrenaline rush still has my heart pounding. When I pass by the blue Volvo, I remember the figure in the car. I glance at the rearview mirror, and I see the hand waving from a crack in the window. I take my foot off the gas and watch the Mercedes pulling farther away from me.
“Damn it,” I curse myself for deciding to do something stupid that could get me killed. I hit the brake and wheel the cruiser around and roll up beside the Volvo. There is a young girl alone in the car, maybe thirteen or fourteen. She ducks down beneath the window as I stop the car, but I can still see the dark brown on top of her head. There are not any walking dead close by, but I still don’t like the idea of getting out of the car here alone. I press the button to lower the passenger side window.
“Quick,” I tell her. “Get in.”
The girl peers over the frame of the door and scans the street with her frightened brown eyes. Then she looks at the letters on the side of the squad car. Without a word, she opens the door and steps out of the car. She pauses before touching the handle of the passenger door of the cruiser.
“Come on, kid,” I urge her.
The girl looks at my blood-soaked clothes and realizes I am definitely not a cop. She whirls away and darts back through the door of the Volvo. Damn it.
A couple of corpses in the middle of the road are starting to get a little too close. There is no time to try and reason with her. I fling open the door and run around the cruiser. Just before she slaps her hand on the lock, I rip open the door of the Volvo. The girl screams when I reach into the car and drag her out.
“Easy,” I sooth, but the girl howls at the top of her lungs.
I pull her by the arms until I can get her out of the car enough to put her over my shoulder. Her elbow smacks the back of my head as she flails. I know I am scaring the hell out of her right now, but it is either this or leaving her here to die.
I dump her in the back seat of the squad car and slam the door. She wails and pounds her fists against the window. Thank God the rear doors of the cruiser don’t open from the inside. I turn to go around the back of the car and bump into a guy in a maintenance jumpsuit with half the skin peeled off his face. His dislodged eyeball dangles by a thread of optic nerves. I stumble backward at the sight of hi
m and struggle to stay on my feet when he lunges at me. His mouth opens, and his hands grab at my shirt. I reach for the gun tucked in the back waist of my pants, but the dead man lunges at me again. I instinctively raise my arm to fend him off while I fumble with the handle of the gun, but I lose my grip, and the gun falls to the ground. His massive hands seize upon my wrist and elbow, and he pulls my arm toward him and opens his mouth.
A hole suddenly appears in the forehead of the corpse. I look down to see dark flecks of coagulated blood spangle my shirt. The massive body falls to the ground. I look down at the corpse in shock and try to process what just happened. I hear Danielle’s voice, telling me to get in the car. I take my eyes off the body on the ground and spot the Mercedes driving away. Then I notice Danielle getting behind the wheel of the squad car.
“Hurry,” Danielle pleads.
My hand finds the handle on the passenger door of the cruiser, and I collapse into the seat. Danielle hits the gas, and I watch her eyes darting from the SUV in front of us to the young girl in the rear view mirror as we race down the road.
“You’re going to be okay now,” Danielle says to console the distraught girl in the back of the car.
“I want to go home,” she begs. “Please. Just take me home.” The girl pulls her knees up to her chest and lowers her face and cries.
“Blake?” Danielle calls to me trying to bring me out of my shocked silence. “Are you okay?”
I glance down at my arms, still unsure that none of the blood on me is mine. That was too close. I think about how I raised my arm to try to fend that corpse off. This reaction is an instinct developed by humans through millions of years of evolution to protect our vital organs. But now, even our instincts just make us more vulnerable. No matter how much we prepped for disasters, the human species is not equipped to deal with this. This is the end of the line for us. The human race won’t survive this.
The chirp of an electronic device in the car snaps me back to reality. It sounds like it could be my phone. My heart races. I dig it out of my pocket and look at the display. No alerts. One of the many devices in the cruiser must have made the noise. I glance around the console and spot the police radio and snatch up the handset.
“Can anyone hear me?” I plead. I am not even sure I am using the damn thing right. I jab at a couple of buttons and twist a dial then try again. “Is there anyone alive out there?” There is no answer. Nothing but dead air. I transmit again, “Please, we need help. If you can hear me, please respond.”
“They can’t all be dead,” says Danielle. “That’s not possible. Right?”
I don’t want to believe that, but the way things are going, it seems likely. After a few long moments with no response to our transmissions, I put the radio back on the hook. “I think from here on out we have to assume the worst,” I admit.
The gas station comes into view with the SUV parked out front of the convenience mart doors. The vehicle is empty. Then I see Dom and Joey haul out armloads of snacks and water and dump the crinkling plastic bags into the back of the Mercedes. Quentin peers up from behind the hood of the vehicle, picks off a corpse on the road then ducks back down.
Danielle pulls up behind them, and as soon as the car comes to a stop the girl in the back starts yanking on the door handle.
“Let me go!” she screams. “Let me go!”
“I’ll go see if they need help,” I tell Danielle. “Keep the car running.”
“Blake,” she places a hand on my arm as I open the car door. She glances at the girl in the back seat of the cruiser. “I’m going to try and calm her down. She’s terrified.”
Although I doubt anything Danielle can say will get through to the girl right now, I nod and tell her that’s a good idea. I leave the cruiser and hurry over to the SUV.
“There’s a police radio in the cruiser,” I inform Quentin. “I tried, but I can’t get anyone on it.”
Quentin grunts and glances around me to where Danielle squats to talk to the girl in the back of the Crown Vic. His scowl tells me he isn’t too happy about something. I wait for a minute, but he just turns and focuses on the corpses coming up the road.
“What is it?” Better to just get it out there and over with now. I can’t afford to have him pissed off at me.
“What did I say, man?” Quentin hisses. He pulls the trigger and drops another corpse near the compressed air pump.
“What are you talking about?” I wonder what I did to piss him off so bad.
“Tell me before you decide to do something stupid,” he gripes. “Remember that conversation?”
“I had to help her,” I insist. “I couldn’t leave her there. For god’s sake, she’s just a kid.”
“Don’t we got enough problems already?” he growls. “Now we got this damn kid to worry about.” Quentin leans his head to the side, and we both glance at the cruiser again. When I look back at Quentin, his expression has softened. He grabs the handle and pulls open the door of the truck and shoves a two-way radio in my chest. “Next time you get a stupid idea,” he warns.
“I know, I know,” I interrupt him. “I got it.”
The bell on the gas station door jingles as Dom and Joey come out again with their arms loaded with jerky, chips and candy bars. They dump it all into the back of the Mercedes.
“Last trip,” says Dom.
“Move it,” Quentin urges her. “We ain’t got all day, sweetheart.”
Dom pauses with her hand on the door handle and starts to open her mouth, but one look at the tall black man with the serious expression is enough to silence her. She whirls and vanishes into the darkness of the store.
“So where to now, boss?” Quentin asks.
I’m not sure what to make of his question. Nobody ever called me boss before for one thing. Maybe he’s being sarcastic, or pissed off, or maybe he’s just the kind of person that feels the need to give everyone a nickname to feel comfortable around them. For a long moment, I just look at him. “We should keep going west,” I say. “We have to get farther away from the city. Maybe we can get to the highway.”
“Less people out that way,” Quentin agrees. He scratches at the goatee on his chin. “Sounds like a solid plan, I guess,” he shrugs. “We’ll follow you, boss.”
This time, I can tell he isn’t being sarcastic at all. It’s just his way of easing the tension I suppose. But still, anyone calling me boss just makes me cringe. “Do me a favor?” I ask. “Don’t call me that.”
I turn to go back to the squad car and notice a corpse wearing a bicycle helmet stumbling around the trunk. Danielle is so preoccupied with the girl she doesn’t see it coming.
I raise the gun and fire off a round that puts a hole in his bright yellow shirt. The corpse wobbles and bumps against the trunk of the car. The girl in the police car lets out a scream and tries to run, but Danielle blocks the door, putting herself between the girl and the dead cyclist. My second shot cracks the bicycle helmet right off his head, but the corpse still stumbles towards Danielle.
“Stay in the car,” Danielle pleads with the terrified girl. Danielle scrambles to get herself inside the cruiser and slam the rear door closed, but it’s too late. The door strikes the shoulder of the dead man as he lunges toward her. Danielle clings to the door handle and leans back as the thing waves an arm around inside the car.
I let out a deep breath and pull the trigger again. The bullet punches a hole in the forehead of the corpse. Danielle releases her grip on the door handle, and the body slumps to the ground at her feet. I almost lower the gun, but then I notice the dead waitress ten steps back, and a couple of steps behind her there is a long-haired teenage corpse wearing a black trench coat.
“We got more coming,” I tell Danielle.
“Time to go,” Quentin yells as Dom and Joey push through the gas station doors. I glance over to see him reloading the handgun, and then he takes aim at the corpse of a postal carrier and fires.
Danielle closes the rear door to the police car, apologi
zing as she locks the screaming girl in the backseat again. I walk around the cruiser to the passenger side, shooting at the dead as I move. Firing the gun on the go proves too difficult for me, and I waste several rounds trying to hit the waitress in the head.
Joey and Dom hurry back out to the Mercedes, having heard the gunfire pick up. They dump the supplies in the back and climb in while Quentin runs around the front of the SUV and enters on the driver side.
“We’re going west,” I tell Danielle.
“West?” she squawks as she throws the car in reverse. She backs the cruiser up, knocking down the waitress. “Sorry,” she says. I’m not sure if she is apologizing to the dead waitress, or to me for damaging the car. She shifts the car into drive and looks around the road again. “Which way is it?” she wonders.
“West!” I repeat.
“Just say right or left!” she yells in frustration.
I point to the right, and she peels out of the gas station onto the road. I glance back to make sure the Mercedes made it out behind us. The four-lane road provides enough room to weave through the shambling dead and abandoned vehicles. Clouds of smoke billow from fires burning unopposed in the surrounding townhouses. Through the haze, I catch glimpses of the chaos down the side streets as we pass. A stroller lies mangled beneath the wheels of a car, a few feet away from the half-eaten remains of an infant in the street. A charred body lies smoking on the lawn of a burning home.
A few survivors hail us from a second story window. I almost tell Danielle to stop the car when I see them waving their arms, but then I spot the dead below. There must be fifty or sixty of them pounding their way through the flimsy glass windows to get inside. We will just get ourselves killed if we stop to help them. So I force myself to look away from their faces and don’t say a word as Danielle continues down the road.
