“Shit, man,” Nicole cried. “You got shot in the shoulder! How the fuck can you be so chill?”
“Practice?” Dave asked with a half smile.
I guess I should have been happy that he was so in control of himself, but I wasn’t. It was actually scary. I reined in my emotions, though. Freaking out and yelling and generally acting like a weepy girl weren’t going to help in this situation.
“Please,” I growled between tightly clenched teeth. “I need to look at the wound.”
He glanced at me and I guess I must have looked like I wasn’t fucking around. He nodded once.
“Nicole, I’m going to slow down. Take the wheel, okay?”
She opened her mouth and I saw protests forming on her lips. Reaching forward, I grabbed her upper arm and shook none too gently.
“Drive. The. Fucking. Truck,” I ground out.
She hesitated for a brief second and then she nodded as she unbuckled and took the wheel. Dave grunted as he unhooked his own belt and slid himself out from the front seat to climb into the back.
The truck swerved slightly, the front wheels drifting onto the rocky shoulder before Nicole got herself situated and managed to jerk us back onto the highway. Dave staggered into the backseat as she twisted the wheel and I reached up a hand to steady him. He was cool to the touch, almost cold, and I caught my breath before I forced a smile. All my earlier anger was completely forgotten.
Of course it had been replaced by stark terror, so I’m not sure it was a good exchange. Equal, but not good.
“Sit here.” I motioned to the seat beside me. “And take off your shirt.”
“Are we going to make out in the backseat?” he asked.
“Please don’t,” Nicole pleaded from the driver’s seat. “I’ve been traumatized enough already today.”
“Let’s see how badly you’re hurt and then we’ll talk about whether or not I want to make out with you,” I said as he scrunched his T-shirt up and over his head.
There was so much to see that I could hardly take it all in. First off, there was a big, dark bruise across his stomach where Ryan had slammed the gun butt that morning. You know, when he’d barely registered even irritation even though the strike had clearly done some damage.
But the bruise wasn’t our immediate problem. No, higher up was our bigger issue, the gaping hole in his shoulder.
It looked like a rifle shot and it had gone through and through from the looks of the entry and exit wounds. It wasn’t the worst thing I’d seen since the start of the zombie issue, but without treatment, it could still kill David.
As could the shock he was apparently in since he didn’t seem that fazed as he took a glance at the hole in his shoulder.
“Huh, look at that,” he muttered.
“Look at that?” I repeated in disbelief. “You have a hole in your body that does not belong there and the best you can do is ‘Look at that’?”
He pursed his lips but ignored me as he reached up toward the wound. I watched in disbelief as he let the tip of his index finger dip into the hole.
“Do we need to dig out a bullet here?” he asked as he poked the wound ceaselessly.
“Stop it!” I snapped as I slapped his hands away. “Don’t poke it.”
“He’s poking it?” Nicole asked, her eyes coming up wide in the rearview mirror. “Don’t poke it! Poking it can’t make it better!”
“Calm down, you two,” Dave said, but he did stop poking the seeping hole. “I’m fine. It doesn’t hurt.”
“It should hurt,” I muttered as I grabbed for his discarded shirt and used it to cover the wound and apply pressure. “You have a hole in your shoulder. If anything should hurt, it’s that.”
Dave rolled his eyes and was about to argue, but Nicole interrupted.
“I think we should stop and see if we can get anything to treat that. I still have some antibiotic cream in my camera bag, although I’m not sure how helpful it will be with a gunshot wound. Will it need stitches?”
I blinked. Damn, I hadn’t even thought of that. I looked down at the hole. It wasn’t yawning or anything, but it wasn’t really a scratch, either.
“Yeah, probably,” I sighed.
“Okay, so we definitely need to stop to get more supplies.” Nicole shook her head and muttered, “Considering we have one gun and at most six or eight bullets, we have to stop.”
I stared at the handgun that Dave had set between the two front seats when we got into the truck. I’d been so distracted by his injury that I hadn’t thought much about our lack of protection.
“Okay,” Dave sighed like he was so put upon and making such a sacrifice to agree with us. “I guess we do need to stop at some point in the next little while.”
“Thank you so much for making that noble concession, Your Highness,” I snapped.
He shot me a look. “But I think we need to get further down the road before we find a place to figure this out and spend the night. I don’t want those camp people to find us, and the more miles we put between us, the better.”
“Do you really think they’re looking for us?” Nicole asked as she tossed us a fearful glance in the rearview mirror. “When we last saw them, they had bigger problems. Bigger, drooling, murderous, brain-eating problems.”
Dave shrugged the same damn shoulder he’d been shot in without even batting an eye. “Well, maybe you’re right, but I’m not willing to take the risk. I’m guessing if they do find us, this time they aren’t going to wait to kill us like they’re the bad guys in some kind of James Bond movie.”
I smiled. Lex had all but monologued on us back in the camp. It was a bit Bondish. “You did unleash zombie hell on them. I would guess you’re right.”
“They deserved it! They tried to kill me in an abandoned pool, for Christ’s sake,” he muttered.
“Okay, okay. I wasn’t judging, just making a point, sheesh.” I shook my head and decided to change the subject since my husband was apparently a tad touchy about this one. “What highway are we on, Nicole?”
She craned her neck and found a sign that was half-bent over alongside the road. It was covered with sludge, but the numbers were sort of visible through the goo. “Looks like 44 East.”
“Perfect,” Dave said with a smile.
“Perfect? We don’t drive on the highways! Zombies, remember? Huge burning crashes? Highway men?” I said as I motioned outside with my free hand.
Along the roadway there were dozens and dozens of moaning, walking corpses, eyeing our vehicle as we zipped past. It was only our high rate of speed that kept them at bay, but if we had to slow down to clear a wreck? Or take a pee break? Or worse, had some kind of breakdown?
Well, we were boned.
Dave shut his eyes and I could almost see him counting to ten in his head before he spoke again. “Well, today we’re driving on the highway. Rules were made to be broken. Drive for another hour, Nicole, and then we’ll find a place to stop for the night, okay? Can we all agree on that?”
I stared at him, but it was obvious this was a rhetorical question. Whether or not I thought we should stop in two days or two seconds, Dave had a plan.
And I’d learned a long time ago not to argue with him when he had a plan.
“Fine.” I sighed. “But at least keep pressure on the wound, okay? I’d hate to have you bleed to death before I could kill you for scaring the shit out of me.”
He smiled as he reached up to press the shirt against his shoulder. Our fingers briefly intertwined and I have to admit that it was reassuring.
“I wouldn’t deny you that pleasure, dear. I know it means a lot to you.”
Our eyes met and despite the fact that we’d been sniping at each other a bit, the connection between us was stronger than ever. He got me, he got my autopilot reaction of going bitchcakes when I got scared because it was the only way I could function without falling apart. And I got him, too. Every brave, fantastic, awesome inch of him.
Without another word, I gave him
a quick kiss on the cheek, then climbed up into the passenger front seat. After I’d buckled in, I popped open the glove compartment to see what treasures our friend Lex had left for us.
Not a lot. No ammunition, damn it, or even another weapon, which was highly disappointing. You find so many of them in glove compartments nowadays, but apparently Lex didn’t like having a backup. At least not in the glove compartment. I’d have to check under and behind the seats once we stopped.
There was no GPS, either, but I guess that made sense. The Lex Camp had decided to shut itself off from humanity as a (completely misguided) way to keep the apocalypse at bay. They didn’t care to find anything close by or even far away.
He did have a bag of beef jerky in the glove compartment, though, and something useful: a map!
I pulled it out and started unfolding it carefully. To my surprise, it was marked with a thick, red outline around a ten-mile-square area that was apparently the “territory” of Lex and his minions.
“I can’t believe they were willing to kill us—”
“Me!” Dave interrupted from the backseat. He was leaning against the door, eyes half-closed. He still didn’t look pained, though, or like he was getting woozy, so that was something. “They were going to kill me.”
“Well, you did volunteer for Pit Duty,” I said with a half-smile for him. “But I can’t believe they were willing to kill you over a relatively small chunk of land in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere Oklahoma.”
“It’s not so surprising,” Nicole said from the driver’s seat. “I mean, people have been killing over land since the beginning of time. At some point, we probably stole that ten-square-mile piece of land in the middle of nowhere from the Indians, right? So it’s not the first time there’s been blood spilled over it.” She hesitated. “But probably the first time with zombies.”
I stared at her until she glanced at me with a blush.
“What? It’s not like celebrity news is all I know. I’m not stupid.”
“No, you are not,” I conceded, and I admit I did so a bit reluctantly.
I hadn’t really liked the girl at first, but she was proving to be useful in many ways. Plus, she had helped me save Dave. So that gave her massive points.
I settled back to watch the road and help her navigate with my handy-dandy map, and we were all quiet for a while.
Time moves weirdly in an apocalypse. An hour can feel like a day if you want it to pass quickly or it can feel like a moment if you need the time. Today, it was somewhere in the middle and soon enough the afternoon had gotten longer. The shadows began to stretch across the road and the sun dipped lower on the horizon.
“We’re actually making decent time,” I said as I checked the map and compared it to the road sign. “We’ve actually gotten close to forty miles in an hour. That may be a new postzombie record.”
“How depressing,” Nicole said. “I used to have this Camaro back before the whole zombie thing and I could make it fly on the highway. I’d get a hundred miles in an hour if I was really feeling frisky.”
When I looked at Nicole, with her cute blonde hair and her bright eyes, I could totally see that. Probably she was one of those girls who batted her eyelashes at cops and got out of tickets, too.
I nodded. “Yeah, well times have changed.”
Dave leaned forward. I was surprised, to be honest. He’d been so quiet, I’d thought he’d fallen asleep, but apparently not. He reached for the map and I let him take it without any argument.
After a few minutes of scanning the paper and checking what was left of the mile markers, he said, “So we’re going to start bumping up against the southwestern part of Tulsa soon and I think we can all agree that roaming into the city at dusk would be a bad idea.”
Both Nicole and I nodded. Shit, I did not want to deal with cities. Honestly, after the past twenty-four hours, I didn’t really want to meet up with any people, zombie or otherwise.
“But,” Dave continued after our silent acquiescence, “I also think we need to find a big enough place to stop that we can actually find some supplies.”
He pushed the map back toward me. “How about right there?”
He was pointing to a city on the map named Plainspark. The city was a dot with a circle around it on the map, which the key in the bottom corner said meant it had had about twenty-thousand people before the outbreak. A lot of potential zombies, but it was better than the nearly four hundred thousand in Tulsa.
“That just might work,” I agreed.
I took back the map and tried to figure out the best exit. Despite our luck with GPS units, I’d also gotten much better at navigating with maps. The hidden talents you don’t know you have until a zombie apocalypse. I wonder if I could dance now, too? Or play the ukulele…
“Plainspark,” Nicole muttered as she glanced at the city name. “Why does that sound so familiar?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. I mean, it’s not really a bustling metropolis. Not a lot of star sightings there.” I motioned to the upcoming exit. “Take that one.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she mused as she steered us off the road.
I breathed a tiny sigh of relief. Whatever Dave said, I really hated traveling the highway.
She shook her head. “Still, I swear I’ve heard the name before.”
To be honest, as we turned toward the town, I found myself surprised. Small or not, this had obviously once been pretty nice. Maybe some kind of Tulsa suburb where the slightly upper class lived. There were a plethora of nice shops and big, classy houses.
Well, the houses and shops that were still standing were lovely, anyway. There had been a fire at some point after the outbreak, probably much after since apparently no one had tried to stop it. Those damn zombie firefighters, never showing up, always on a “Braaaains” break.
Whatever had started it, though, about half the town had been devoured by flames. Husks of buildings slumped into overgrown yards and broken and blackened bricks were scattered across the road. Even the ashes along Main Street were smoldering in places.
Had anyone still been alive when this happened? Er… strike that… not undead alive. Like really alive.
“Still,” I muttered as we turned into a neighborhood called Village Green that seemed to be off the main track of the fire. “It could be a lot worse.”
Of course the moment I said that, three zombies lumbered from the half-dead bushes around one of the big houses and stood on the sidewalk, watching us drive by. They were recent converts, too. How do I know?
Clothing is always the giveaway. Ratty, rotting clothing=old zombie. New clothing=new zombie. These zombies had on jeans that were only slightly sludgy and bloody and all their naughty parts were covered by fabric. Which you do have to mention because sometimes… they were not.
Ew.
“Shit,” Nicole muttered as she sped forward and careened around a corner so the zombies wouldn’t be able to find us. “Looks like that neighborhood is out.”
“Hey, what about that?” Dave said, motioning in front of us.
There, in the distance, was another building. But this one wasn’t a house. It was a hospital. Small but easily marked by the blue cross on the sign leading up to it.
“Plainspark Medical and Surgery Center,” I read the sign. “Well, they’ll probably have some good supplies. But it’s a big enough building that it might be risky. What do you think?”
I turned toward Dave. He had pulled the T-shirt away from his bare chest and was back to poking at the hole in his shoulder.
“David!” I snapped.
He jerked his gaze to me and his expression was absent and distant. “What? Oh, yeah. There will be medical supplies probably, but not a lot of food and weapons.”
Nicole eyed him in the mirror and her frown spoke volumes. “Right now I think medical is more important. I vote hospital.”
“My vote is hospital, too,” I said, waving at him to cover the wound with his T-shirt. “And we might get lucky with som
e of the other stuff. You never know.”
Dave shrugged. “Sure. Just pull up to the emergency entrance and we’ll try to pry the door open.”
“I’ll try to pry the door open,” I corrected him as Nicole slid to a stop by the big blue EMERGENCY sign. “You will sit in the truck and think about not bleeding to death.”
Before he could respond, I grabbed the handgun, got out of the truck, and slammed the door in his face. Holding the weapon at the ready, I looked around with the familiar tickle of fear and wariness pricking the back of my neck.
In the shadow of the hospital with the sun dipping out of my sight, it was dusky and cool. And quiet, so damn quiet. Even after all these months, I hadn’t gotten used to how silent the apocalypse was. At first, I hadn’t minded. I mean, I had always hated city noises and complained incessantly to David about wanting to live somewhere quieter. But what I wouldn’t give now for honking horns and chatting people and low-flying planes.
Really anything that said, “Civilization has survived. Congratulations.”
I pushed away those thoughts and carefully slipped the pistol into my waistband as I examined the automatic doors. They weren’t sliding, though of course they wouldn’t be. No power. I slipped my hand into the rubber stoppers between them and shoved, then I shoved harder… then I threw all my weight into the act and grunted with effort… but the door still didn’t move. Not even a fraction.
“Shit,” I muttered because the fact that I couldn’t get the door wedged open meant that some brilliant person inside had shut it down and locked it when the shit hit the fan outside.
I was guessing that hadn’t worked out for the best in the long run. In a zombie apocalypse, being locked in wasn’t a good thing.
I looked around for some kind wedge device I could slide between the doors and force them open. I eventually settled on a big stick that had fallen from one of the old trees planted around the hospital perimeter. I was heading back to the door when Dave slung himself out of the truck and strode up beside me.
“You’re not going to be able to get it—” I started as he slid his arm into the area between the doors. He gave a little shove, and I mean little, and the space between them yawned open wide enough that we could all get through.
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