“C’mon, Philip, we can’t get around it,” Nick says.
Brian speaks up. “Maybe we can cut across to 278.”
“GODDAMNIT, SHUT UP AND LET ME THINK!”
The sudden flare of rage makes Philip’s skull throb with the force of a splitting migraine, and he grits his teeth, clenching his fists and stuffing the voice back down inside himself: Crack it open, do it, tear it open now, tear the heart out …
“Sorry,” Philip says, wiping his mouth, glancing over his shoulder at the frightened little girl huddling in the darkness of the backseat. “I’m real sorry, punkin, Daddy lost it there for a second.”
The little girl stares at the floor.
“What do you want to do?” Brian asks softly, and from the forlorn tone of his voice it sounds as though he would follow his brother into the flames of hell if Philip thought that was the best option right now.
“Last exit was—what?—maybe a mile or so back there?” Philip glances over his shoulder. “I’m thinking that maybe we should—”
The slapping noise comes out of nowhere, cutting Philip off mid-thought.
Penny shrieks.
“SHIT!”
Nick jerks away from the passenger window, where a charred corpse has materialized out of the darkness.
“Get down, Nick. Now.” Philip’s voice is flat and unaffected, like a radio dispatcher, as he quickly leans over to the glove box, pops the tiny door, and fishes for something. The thing outside the window presses up against the glass, barely recognizable as human, its flesh blistered to a crisp. “Brian, cover Penny’s eyes.”
“SHIT! SHIT!” Nick ducks down and covers his head, as though in an air raid. “SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!”
Philip finds the Ruger .22 pistol where he left it, already with a round in the chamber.
In one fluid motion Philip raises the weapon with his right hand, while simultaneously jacking down the power window with his left. The burned zombie reaches through the opening with its scorched, emaciated arm, letting out a guttural moan, but before it can grab hold of Nick’s shirt, Philip squeezes off a single shot—point-blank, into the thing’s skull.
The bark of the Ruger is enormously loud inside the Subrban’s interior, and it makes everybody jump, as the charred corpse whiplashes—a direct hit above its left temple sending brain matter spitting across the inside of the windshield.
The thing slides down the outside of the passenger door, the muffled sound of its body hitting the pavement barely audible over the ringing in Philip’s ears.
* * *
Twenty-two-caliber semiautos like the Ruger have a unique bark. The blast sounds like a hard flat slap—a two-by-four smacking concrete—and the gun invariably jumps in the shooter’s hand.
That night, despite the muffling effect of the interior of the Suburban, that single boom echoed out across the dark landscape, reverberating over treetops and office parks, carrying on the wind.
The slapback could be heard a mile away, piercing the silence of the deep woods, penetrating the mortified auditory canals of shadowy creatures, awakening dead central nervous systems.
* * *
“Everybody awright?” Philip looks around the dark interior, setting the hot gun down on the carpeted hump next to him. “Everybody cool?”
Nick is just now rising back up, his eyes wide and hot, taking in all the residue on the inside of the glass. Penny, curled up in Brian’s arms, keeps her eyes shut, as Brian frantically looks around, peering through all the windows, looking for any other intruders.
Philip slams the Suburban into reverse, kicking the accelerator as he quickly rolls the window back up. Everybody jerks forward as the vehicle screeches backward—a hundred feet, a hundred and fifty feet, two hundred feet—away from the smoking tanker truck.
Then the Suburban skids to a stop, and they sit there in stunned silence for a moment.
Nothing moves outside in the flickering shadows. Nobody says anything for the longest time, but Philip is convinced he’s not the only one, at this moment, wondering if this twenty-mile trek into the city is going to be a lot harder than they originally thought.
* * *
They sit there in the idling Suburban for quite some time, debating their best course of action, and this makes Philip very antsy. He doesn’t like sitting in one place for very long, especially with the engine running, burning gas and time, with those moving shadows behind the burning trees, but the group cannot seem to come to a consensus, and Philip is trying his hardest to be a benevolent dictator in this little banana republic.
“Look, I still say we try to drive around it.” Philip gives a nod toward the darkness to the south.
The far shoulder of the oncoming lanes is littered with smoldering vehicles, but there’s a narrow gap—maybe the width of the Suburban, with a few inches to spare—between the gravel shoulder and the thicket of pines along the highway. The recent rains combined with the oil spill from the overturned tanker have turned the land to slop. But the Suburban is a big, heavy vehicle with wide tires, and Philip has driven the thing through far worse conditions.
“It’s too steep, Philly,” Nick says, wiping the gray matter from the inside of the windshield with a grimy towel.
“Yeah, man, I have to agree,” Brian says from the shadows of the backseat, his arm around Penny, the anguished features of his face visible in the flicker of firelight. “I vote for heading back to the last exit.”
“We don’t know what we’ll find on 278, though, it could be worse.”
“We don’t know that,” Nick says.
“We gotta keep moving forward.”
“But what if it’s worse in the city? Seems like it’s getting worse the closer we get.”
“We’re still fifteen, twenty miles away—we don’t know shit about what it’s like in Atlanta.”
“I don’t know, Philly.”
“Tell you what,” Philip says. “Let me take a look.”
“What do you mean?”
He reaches for the gun. “I’ll just take a quick look.”
“Wait!” Brian speaks up. “Philip, come on. We gotta stick together.”
“I’m just gonna see what the ground is like, see if we can make it through.”
“Daddy—” Penny starts to say something, and then thinks better of it.
“It’s okay, punkin, I’ll be right back.”
Brian looks out the window, unconvinced. “We agreed we’d stick together. No matter what. C’mon, man.”
“It’ll take two minutes.” Philip opens his door, shoving the Ruger into his belt.
The cool air and the sound of crackling flames and the smell of ozone and burning rubber waft into the Suburban like uninvited guests. “You guys sit tight, I’ll be right back.”
Philip climbs out of the car.
The door slams.
* * *
Brian sits in the silent Suburban for a moment, listening to his heart thudding in his chest. Nick is looking through each and every window, scanning the immediate vicinity, which is alive with flickering shadows. Penny gets very still. Brian looks at the little girl. The child looks like she’s shrinking into herself, like a little night bloom, contracting into itself, pulling its petals shut.
“He’ll be right back, kiddo,” Brian says to the kid. He aches for her. This is not right, a child going through this, but on some level Brian knows how she feels. “He’s a tough old boy, Philip. He can beat the crap outta any monster comes along, believe me.”
From the front seat Nick turns and says, “Listen to your uncle, sweetie. He’s right. Your daddy can take care of himself and then some.”
“I saw your daddy catch a rabid dog once,” Brian says. “He was maybe nineteen, and there was this German shepherd terrorizing the neighbor kids.”
“I remember that,” Nick says.
“Your daddy chased that thing—foaming mouth and all—down to the dry creek bed, and he wrestled the damn thing into a trash barrel.”
“I t
otally remember that,” Nick says. “Grabbed it with his bare hands, threw it halfway across the gully before slamming the trash can down on it like he was catching a fly.”
Brian reaches down and tenderly brushes a strand of hair from the little girl’s face. “He’ll be okay, honey … trust me. He’s a mean muchacho.”
Outside the vehicle, a piece of burning wreckage falls to the ground. The clatter makes everybody jump. Nick looks at Brian. “Hey, man … you mind reaching back into that zipper bag by the wheel well?”
Brian looks at Nick. “What do you need?”
“One of them goose guns.”
Brian stares at him a moment, then turns and leans over the back headrest. He roots out the long, canvas hunting bag wedged between a cooler and a backpack. He unzips it and finds one of the Marlin 55s.
Handing the shotgun across the backseat to Nick in the front, Brian says, “You need the shells, too?”
“I think it’s already loaded,” Nick says, hinging open the barrel and peering down into the breech.
Brian can tell Nick is handy with the thing, has probably hunted before, although Brian never witnessed it. Brian had never been the type to participate in the manly pursuits of his younger brother and his cronies, although he secretly yearned to do just that. “Two shells in the breech,” Nick says, snapping the barrel shut.
“Just be careful with that thing,” Brian says.
“Used to hunt feral hogs with one of these babies,” Nick says, cocking and locking it.
“Hogs?”
“Yep … wild hogs … up to Chattahoochee reservation. Used to go on night hunts with my dad and my uncle Verne.”
“Pigs you’re talking about,” Brian says incredulously.
“Yeah, basically. A hog is just a big ol’ pig. Maybe they’re older, too, I’m not—”
Another loud metallic crash comes from outside Nick’s window.
Nick jerks the barrel toward the noise, finger on the trigger, his teeth gnashing with nervous tension. Nothing moves outside the passenger window. Muscles uncoil inside the Suburban, a long sigh of relief from Nick. Brian starts to say, “We gotta get our butts in gear before—”
Another noise.
This time it comes from the driver’s side, a shuffling of feet—
—and before Nick can even register the identity of the shadowy figure approaching the Suburban’s driver-side window, he swings the Marlin’s muzzle up at the window, takes aim, and is about to squeeze off a couple of twenty-gauge greetings, when a familiar voice booms outside the car.
“JESUS CHRIST!”
Philip is visible outside the window just for an instant, before ducking out of the line of fire.
“Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Nick says, instantly recognizing his mistake.
Philip’s voice outside the window is lower now, more controlled, but still seething with anger. “You want to point that thing away from the goddamn window?”
Nick lowers the barrel. “I’m sorry, Philly, my bad, I’m sorry.”
The door clicks and Philip slips back into the car, breathing hard, his face shiny with sweat. He shuts his door and lets out a long breath. “Nick—”
“Philly, I’m sorry … I’m a little jumpy.”
For a moment Philip looks like he’s going to take the other man’s head off, then the anger fades. “We’re all a little jumpy … I get that.”
“I’m totally sorry.”
“Just pay attention.”
“I will, I will.”
Brian speaks up. “What did you find out there?”
Philip reaches up to the stick shift. “A way around this damn mess.” He flips it into four-wheel drive and slams the lever down. “Everybody hold on.”
* * *
He turns the wheel, and they slowly roll across a spray of broken glass. The shards crunch under the Suburban’s massive wheels, and nobody says anything, but Brian’s thinking about the potential for flat tires.
Philip steers the vehicle down across the center median—which is a shallow culvert overgrown with switchgrass, weeds, and cattails—and the rear wheels dig into the rutted earth. As they approach the other side, Philip gives it a little more juice, and the Suburban lurches upward and across the eastbound lanes.
Philip keeps his hands glued to the steering wheel as they approach the far shoulder. “Hold on!” he calls out, as they suddenly plunge down a slope of muddy weeds.
The Suburban pitches sideways like a sinking ship. Brian holds on to Penny, and Nick holds on to the center armrest. Yanking the wheel, Philip kicks the accelerator.
The vehicle fishtails toward a narrow gap in the wreckage. Tree branches scrape the side of the SUV. The rear wheels slide sideways, then chew into the mud. Philip wrestles the wheel. Everybody else holds their respective breaths, as the Suburban scrapes through the opening.
When the car emerges out the other side, a spontaneous cheer rings out. Nick slaps Philip on the back, and Brian whoops and hollers triumphantly. Even Penny seems to lighten up a little, the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her tulip-shaped lips.
Through the windshield they can see the tangle of vehicles in the darkness ahead of them—at least twenty cars, SUVs, and light trucks in the westbound lanes—most of them damaged in the pileup. All of them abandoned, many of them burned-out shells. The empty vehicles stretch back at least a hundred yards.
Philip puts the pedal to the metal, muscling the SUV back toward the road. He jerks the wheel. The rear of the SUV wags and churns.
Something is wrong. Brian feels the loss of traction beneath them like a buzzing in his spine, the engine revving suddenly.
The cheering dies.
The car is stuck.
* * *
For a moment Philip keeps the pedal to the floor, urging the thing forward with his ass cheeks, as if his sheer force of will and white-hot rage—and the tightening of his sphincter muscles—can get the blasted thing to move. But the Suburban keeps drifting sideways. Soon the thing is simply spinning all four wheels, kicking up twin gushers of mud out the back into the moonlit darkness behind them.
“FUCK!—FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Philip slams a fist down on the steering wheel, hard enough to make the thing crack and send a splinter of pain up his arm. He practically shoves the foot feed through the floor, the engine screaming.
“Let up on it, man!” Nick hollers over the noise. “It’s just digging us in deeper!”
“FUCK!”
Philip lets up on the gas.
The engine winds down, the Suburban leaning to one side, a foundering boat in brackish waters.
“We gotta push it out,” Brian says after a moment of tense silence.
“Take the wheel,” Philip says to Nick, opening his door and slipping outside. “Give it gas when I tell ya to. Come on, Brian.”
Brian opens the rear door, slips outside, and joins his brother in the glow of the taillights.
The rear tires have sunk at least six inches into the greasy muck, each rear quarter panel spattered with mud. The front wheels are no better. Philip places his big, gnarled hands on the wood grain of the tailgate, and Brian moves to the other side, assuming a wide stance in order to get a better purchase in the mud.
Neither of them notices the dark figures lumbering out of the trees on the other side of the highway.
“Okay, Nick, now!” Philip calls out and shoves with all his might.
The engine growls.
The wheels churn, spewing fountains of mud, as the Blake brothers push and push. They push with everything they have, all to no avail, as the slow-moving figures behind them shamble closer.
“Again!” Philip shouts, putting all his weight behind the shoving.
The rear wheels spin, sinking deeper into the mire, as Brian gets sprayed with an aerosol of mud.
Behind him, moving through a fog bank of smoke and shadows, the uninvited close the distance to about fifty yards, crunching through broken glass with the slow, lazy, awkward movem
ents of injured lizards.
“Get back in the car, Brian.” Philip’s voice has abruptly changed, becoming low and even. “Right now.”
“What is it?”
“Just do it.” Philip is opening the rear hatch. Hinges squeak as he reaches in and fishes for something. “Don’t ask any questions.”
“But what about—” Brian’s words stick in his throat as he catches a glimpse in his peripheral vision of at least a dozen dark figures—maybe more—closing in on them from several directions.
SIX
The figures approach from across the median, and from behind the flaming debris of the wreck, and from the adjacent woods—all shapes and sizes, faces the color of spackling compound, eyes gleaming like marbles in the firelight. Some are burned. Some are in tatters. Some are so well dressed and groomed they look as though they just came from church. Most have that curled-lip, exposed-incisor look of insatiable hunger.
“Shit.” Brian looks at his brother. “What are you gonna do? What are you thinking?”
“Get your ass in the car, Brian.”
“Shit—shit!” Brian hurries around to the side door, throws it open, and climbs in next to Penny, who is looking around with a bewildered expression. Brian slams the door, and smashes down the lock. “Lock the doors, Nick.”
“I’m gonna help him—” Nick goes for his goose gun and opens his door, but he stops abruptly when he hears the strange sound of Philip’s flat, cold, metallic tone through the open rear hatch.
“I got this. Do what he says, Nick. Lock the doors and stay down.”
“There’s too many of them!” Nick is thumbing the hammers on the Marlin, already with his right leg out the door, his work boot on the pavement.
“Stay in the car, Nick.” Philip is digging out a pair of matched log splitters. A few days ago he found the small axes in a garden shed of a mansion at Wiltshire Estates—two matched, balanced implements of razor-sharp carbon steel—and at the time he wondered what in the world some fat rich guy (who probably paid a yard service to split his firewood) would want a pair of small bad-axes for.
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