In the front seat, Nick pulls his leg back inside the SUV, slams his door, and bangs the lock down. He twists around with his eyes blazing and the gun cradled in his arms. “What the hell? What are you doing, Philly?”
The rear hatch slams.
The silence crashes down on the interior.
Brian looks down at the child. “I’m thinking maybe you ought to get down on the floor, kiddo.”
Penny says nothing as she slides down the front of the seat, and then curls into a fetal position. Something in her expression, some glint of knowing in her big soft eyes, reaches out to Brian and puts the squeeze on his heart. He pats her shoulder. “We’ll get through this.”
Brian turns and peers over the backseat, over the cargo and out through the rear window.
Philip has a bad-axe in either hand, and is calmly walking toward the converging crowd of zombies. “Jesus,” Brian utters under his breath.
“What’s he doing, Brian?” Nick’s voice is high and taut, his hands fingering the Marlin’s bolt.
Brian cannot muster a response because he is now held rapt by the terrible sight through the window.
* * *
It’s not pretty. It’s not graceful or cool or heroic or manly or even well executed … but it feels good. “I got this,” Philip says to himself, under his breath, as he lashes out at the closest one, a heavyset man in farmer’s dungarees.
The bad-axe sheers off a grapefruit-sized lobe of the fat one’s skull, sending a geyser of pink matter into the night air. The zombie falls. But Philip doesn’t stop. Before the next closest one can reach him, Philip goes to work on the big flaccid body on the ground, windmilling the cold steel in each hand down on the dead flesh. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Blood and tissue fountain. Sparks kick off the pavement with each blow.
“I got this, I got this, I got this,” Philip murmurs to no one in particular, letting all the pent-up rage and sorrow come out in a flurry of glancing blows. “I got this, I got this, I got this, I got this, I got this—”
By this point others have closed in—a skinny young man with black fluid dripping off his lips, a fat woman with a bloated, dead face, a guy in a bloody suit—and Philip spins away from the mangled corpse on the ground to go to work on the others. He grunts with each blow—I GOT THIS!—cleaving skulls—I GOT THIS!—severing carotid arteries—I GOT THIS!—letting his anger drive the cold steel through cartilage and bone and nasal cavities—I GOT THIS!—the blood and brain matter misting up across his face as he remembers the foaming mouth of rabid fangs coming for him when he was a kid, and God taking his wife Sarah, and the monsters taking his best friend Bobby Marsh—I GOT THIS!—I GOT THIS!—I GOT THIS!!
* * *
Inside the Suburban, Brian turns away from the scene outside the back window, coughs, and feels his gut rising at the nauseating sounds penetrating the sealed interior of the Suburban. He stifles the urge to vomit. He reaches down and gently puts his hands around Penny’s ears, a gesture which, sadly, is becoming a routine.
In the front seat Nick cannot tear his eyes from the carnage behind them. On Nick’s face Brian can see a weird mixture of repulsion and admiration—a kind of thank-God-he’s-on-our-side type of awe—but it only serves to tighten Brian’s gut. He will not throw up, goddamnit, he will be strong for Penny.
Brian slips down on the floor and holds the girl close to him. The child is limp and damp. Brian’s brain swims with confusion.
His brother is everything to him. His brother is the key. But something is happening to Philip, something horrible, and it’s beginning to gnaw at Brian. What are the rules? These walking abominations deserve every fucking thing Philip is dishing out … but what are the rules of engagement?
Brian is trying to put these thoughts out of his mind when he realizes the killing noises have ceased. Then he hears the heavy boot steps of a person outside the driver’s side door. The door clicks.
Philip Blake slips back inside the Suburban, dropping the bloody hand-axes on the floor in front of Nick. “There’ll be more of ’em,” he says, still winded, his face beaded with perspiration. “The gunshot woke ’em up.”
Nick peers out the back window at the battlefield of bodies visible in the firelight on the slope, his voice coming out in a monotone, a combination of awe and disgust: “Home run, man … grand slam home run.”
“We gotta get outta here,” Philip says, wiping a pearl of sweat from his nose, catching his breath, and glancing up at the rearview mirror, searching for Penny in the shadows of the backseat as if he doesn’t even hear Nick.
Brian speaks up. “What’s the plan, Philip?”
“We gotta find a safe place to stay for the night.”
Nick looks at Philip. “What do you mean exactly? You mean other than the Suburban?”
“It’s too dangerous out here in the dark.”
“Yeah, but—”
“We’ll push it out of the mud in the morning.”
“Yeah, but what about—”
“Grab whatever you need for the night,” Philip says, reaching for the Ruger.
“Wait!” Nick grabs Philip’s arm. “You’re talking about leaving the car! Leaving all our shit out here?”
“Just for the night, come on,” Philip says, opening his door and climbing out.
Brian lets out a sigh and looks up at Nick. “Shut up and help me with the backpacks.”
* * *
They camp that night about a quarter of a mile west of the overturned tanker, inside an abandoned yellow school bus, which sits on the shoulder, well illuminated by the cold glow of a sodium vapor light.
The bus is still fairly warm and dry, and it’s high enough off the pavement to give them good sight lines on the woods on either side of the interstate. It has two doors—one in the front and one off the rear—for easy escape. Plus the bench seats are padded and long enough for each of them to stretch out for some semblance of rest. The keys are still in the ignition, and the battery still has juice.
Inside the bus it smells like the inside of a stale lunchbox, the ghosts of sweaty, rambunctious kids with their wet mittens and body odors lingering in the fusty air.
They eat some Spam and some sardines and some expensive pita crackers that were probably meant to adorn party trays at golf outings. They use flashlights, careful not to shine them off the windows, and eventually they spread their sleeping bags on the bench seats for some shut-eye, or at least some facsimile of sleep.
They each take turns sitting watch in the cab with one of the Marlins, using the huge side mirrors for unobstructed views of the bus’s rear end. Nick takes the first shift and tries unsuccessfully for nearly an hour to raise a station on his portable weather radio. The world has shut down, but at least this section of Interstate 20 is equally still. The edges of the woods remain quiet.
When it’s Brian’s turn to sit watch—up to this point he has only managed a few minutes of fitful dozing on a squeaky bench seat in back—he gladly takes his place in the cab with all the levers and the dangling pine tree air fresheners and the laminated photograph of some long-lost driver’s baby son. Not that Brian is very comfortable with the prospects of being the only one awake, or for that matter, having to fire the goose gun. Still, he needs some time to think.
At some point just before dawn, Brian hears Penny’s breathing—just barely audible over the faint whistle of the wind through the ranks of sliding windows—becoming erratic and hyperventilated. The child has been dozing a few seats away from the cab, next to her father.
Now the little girl sits up with a silent gasp. “Oh … I got it … I mean…” Her voice is barely a whisper. “I got it, I think.”
“Ssshhh,” Brian says, rising from his seat, creeping back down the cabin to the little girl, whispering, “It’s okay, kiddo … Uncle Brian’s here.”
“Um.”
“It’s okay … ssshhhh … let’s not wake your dad.” Brian glances over at Philip, who is tangled in a blanket, h
is face contorted with troubling dreams. He took half a pint of brandy before bed to knock himself out.
“I’m okay,” Penny utters in her mousey little voice, looking down at the stuffed penguin in her small hands, squeezing it like a talisman. The thing is soiled and threadbare, and it breaks Brian’s heart.
“Bad dreams?”
Penny nods.
Brian looks at her and thinks it over. “Got an idea,” he whispers. “Why don’t you come up and keep me company for a while.”
The little girl nods.
He helps her up, and then, draping a blanket around her and taking her hand, he silently leads her back up to the cab. He flips down a little jump seat next to the driver’s perch, and says, “There ya go.” He pats the worn upholstery. “You can be my copilot.”
Penny settles into the seat with her blanket pulled tightly around her and the penguin.
“See that?” Brian points to a filthy little video monitor above the dash, about the size of a paperback book, on which a grainy black-and-white image reveals the highway behind them. The wind rustles through the trees, the sodium lights gleaming off the roofs of wrecked cars. “That’s a security camera, for backing up, see?”
The girl sees it.
“We’re safe here, kiddo,” Brian says as convincingly as possible. Earlier in his shift he had figured out a way to turn the ignition key to the accessory position, lighting up the dash like an old pinball machine coming to life. “Everything’s under control.”
The girl nods.
“You want to tell me about it?” Brian says softly a moment later.
Penny looks confused. “Tell you about what?”
“The bad dream. Sometimes it helps to like … tell someone … you know? Makes it go away … poof.”
Penny gives him a feeble little shrug. “I dreamed I got sick.”
“Sick like … those people out there?”
“Yes.”
Brian takes a long, anguished, deep breath. “Listen to me, kiddo. Whatever these people have, you are not going to catch it. Do you understand? Your daddy will not let that happen, never in a million years. I will not let that happen.”
She nods.
“You are very important to your daddy. You are very important to me.” Brian feels an unexpected hitch in his chest, a catching of his words, a burning sensation in his eyes. For the first time since he departed his parents’ place over a week and half ago, he realizes how deeply his feelings go for this little girl.
“I got an idea,” he says after getting his emotions in check. “Do you know what a code word is?”
Penny looks at him. “Like a secret code?”
“Exactly.” Brian licks his finger, and then wipes a stain of dirt from her cheek. “You and I are going to have this secret code word.”
“Okay.”
“This is a very special code. Okay? From now on, whenever I say this secret word, I want you to do something for me. Can you do that? Can you, like, always remember to do something for me whenever I give you the secret code word?”
“Sure … I guess.”
“Whenever I say the code word, I want you to hide your eyes.”
“Hide my eyes?”
“Yeah. And cover your ears. Until I tell you it’s okay to look. All right? And there’s one more thing.”
“Okay.”
“Whenever I give you the secret code … I want you to remember something.”
“What?”
“I want you to remember that there’s gonna come a day when you won’t have to hide your eyes anymore. There’s gonna come a day when everything’s all better, and there won’t be any more sick people. Got that?”
She nods. “Got it.”
“Now what’s the word gonna be?”
“You want me to pick it?”
“You bet … it’s your secret code … you should pick it.”
The little girl wrinkles up her nose as she ponders a suitable word. The sight of her contemplating—so intently that she looks as though she’s calculating the Pythagorean theorem—presses down on Brian’s heart.
Finally the child looks up at Brian, and for the first time since the plague had begun, a glimmer of hope kindles in her enormous eyes. “I got it.” She whispers the word to her stuffed animal, then looks up. “Penguin likes it.”
“Great … don’t keep me in suspense.”
“Away,” she says. “The secret code word’s gonna be away.”
* * *
The gray dawn comes in stages. First, an eerie calm settles around the interstate, the wind dying in the trees, and then a luminous pale glow around the edges of the forest wakes everybody up and gets them going.
The sense of urgency is almost immediate. They feel naked and exposed without their vehicle, so everybody concentrates on the task at hand: packing up, getting back to the Suburban, and getting the damn thing unstuck.
They make the quarter-mile hike back to the SUV in fifteen minutes, carrying their bedrolls and excess food in backpacks. They encounter a single zombie on the way, a wandering teenage girl, and Philip easily puts out her lights by quickly and quietly chopping a furrow into her skull, while Brian whispers the secret word to Penny.
When they reach the Suburban, they work in silence, ever mindful of the shadows of adjacent woods. First they try to apply weight to the rear end by putting Nick and Philip on the tailgate, and having Brian give it gas from the driver’s seat, pushing with one leg outside the door. It doesn’t work. Then they search the immediate area for something to build traction under the wheels. It takes them an hour but they eventually unearth a couple of broken pallets scattered along a drainage ditch, and they bring them back, and wedge them under the wheels.
This also fails.
Somehow the mud beneath the SUV is so saturated with moisture and runoff and oil and God knows what else that it just keeps sucking the vehicle deeper, the leaning Suburban slipping progressively backward down the slope. But they refuse to give up. Driven by a relentless anxiety over unexplained noises in the adjacent pine forest—twigs snapping, low concussive booms in the distance—as well as the constant unspoken dread of having all their worldly possessions and supplies lost with the foundering Suburban, nobody is willing to face the encroaching hopelessness of the situation.
By mid-afternoon, after working for hours, and breaking for lunch, and then going back at it for a couple more hours, all they have succeeded in doing is causing the SUV to drift nearly six feet farther down the muddy incline, while Penny sits inside the vehicle, alternately playing with Penguin and pressing her morose face to the window.
At that point, Philip steps back from the mud pit and gazes at the western horizon.
The overcast sky has begun its fade toward dusk, and the prospect of nightfall suddenly puts a pinch on Philip’s gut. Covered with sludge, soaked in sweat, he pulls a bandana and wipes his neck.
He starts to say something, when another series of noises from the neighboring trees yank his attention to the south. For hours now the crackling, snapping noises—maybe footsteps, maybe not—have been getting closer.
Nick and Brian—both wiping their hands with rags—join Philip. None of them says anything for a moment. Each of their expressions reflects the hard reality, and when another snap from the trees crackles—as loud as a pistol shot—Nick speaks up: “Writing’s on the wall, ain’t it.”
Philip shoves his handkerchief back in his pocket. “Night’s gonna fall soon.”
“Whattya think, Philly?”
“Time for plan B.”
Brian swallows hard, looking at his brother. “I wasn’t aware there was a plan B.”
Philip gazes at his brother, and for a moment, Philip feels a bizarre mixture of anger, pity, impatience, and affection. Then Philip looks at the old, rust-pocked Suburban, and feels a twinge of melancholy, as though he’s about to say good-bye to another old friend. “There is now.”
* * *
They siphon gas from the Suburban int
o plastic tanks they brought from Wiltshire. Then they get lucky enough to find a big, late-model Buick LeSabre, the keys still in it, left for dead on the side of the road, about an eighth of a mile west of there. They commandeer the Buick and roar back to the foundered SUV. They fill the Buick with gas and transfer as many supplies as they can squeeze into the car’s huge trunk.
Then they take off toward the setting sun, each of them glancing back at the swamped SUV, receding into the distance like a shipwreck sinking into oblivion.
* * *
Indications of the looming apocalypse appear on either side of the interstate with alarming frequency now. As they draw nearer and nearer to the city, weaving with increasing difficulty through abandoned wreckage—the trees thinning and giving way to a growing number of residential enclaves, shopping plazas, and office parks—the telltale signs of doom are everywhere. They pass a dark, deserted Walmart, the windows broken, a sea of clothes and merchandise strewn across the parking lot. They notice more and more power outages, entire communities as dark and silent as tombs. They pass strip malls ravaged by looting, biblical warnings scrawled on exhaust chimneys. They even see a small single-engine plane, tangled in a giant electrical tower, still smoking.
Somewhere between Lithonia and Panthersville, the Buick’s rear end starts vibrating like a son of bitch, and Philip realizes the thing has two blown tires. Maybe they were already flat when they acquired the car. Who knows? But there is no time to try and fix the infernal things, and no time to debate the matter.
Night is pressing in again, and the closer they get to the outskirts of metro Atlanta, the more the roads are knotted with the carcasses of mangled wrecks and abandoned cars. Nobody says it out loud, but they are all beginning to wonder whether they could get into the city faster on foot. Even the neighboring two-lanes like Hillandale and Fairington are blocked with empty cars, lined up like fallen dominoes in the middle of the road. At this rate, it will take them a week to get into town.
Which is why Philip makes the executive decision at that point to leave the Buick where it sits, pack up every last thing they can possibly carry, and set out on foot. Nobody’s crazy about the idea, but they go along with it. The alternative of searching the frozen traffic jam in the pitch-darkness for spare tires or a suitable replacement vehicle doesn’t seem viable right now.
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