by D. F. Noble
Jake knew deep down, knew instantly, that there could only be one thing to make those monsters get so ferocious, and that was kids. There were kids in that car, and they were about to be overrun.
Jake skid to a stop, took one look around him and realized all the grownups were focused on that vehicle. Gunshots crackled, and something whizzed past Jake's head. He knew it was a bullet and it didn't matter. He slid his pistol out, steadied his aim off the bike's handlebars and started aiming for heads.
Pow!
A woman with a broken mop handle took a bullet in the neck. It must have split her jugular, for blood shot out like a fan. She raised the splintered weapon above her head as if to strike something, then fell over, obviously losing too much blood to continue.
Pow!
A bald eyeless man in a business suit stabbed a knife into the roof of the car. His bald spot made an excellent target since it glinted in the sun. The 9mm round punctured a nice black hole in the crown of his skull and shot out of his jaw, and still had enough pizzazz to bury itself into the man's chest. He fell into the crowd, blood gurgling up from three different exit wounds.
Pow! Pow!
A bullet slammed into a woman's back and blew out through her lung. She continued to lurch with the crowd, swinging at the car as if nothing happened. A second round caught her behind the ear, zipped around inside her brain, following the brainpan in left turns like a NASCAR race till the inside of her head was puréed mush.
He fired another volley, and no matter how many he put down, more just wandered out of the smoke behind the car. If he didn't do something fast, that wall of smoke would just keeping coming, and then he'd be fighting blind..
There are just too many, Jake thought. I have to do something...
***
Dean wasn't scared anymore, he was just fucking pissed. Beyond pissed. He was going to die a virgin. Him and Alex both, dead as shit virgins. Dean had just become free; Mac was gone. The world, it was starting to show a glimmer of motherfucking hope, and what happens?
Grownups start ripping their fucking eyes out and killing kids, that's what.
You find yourself in a fucking piece of shit fucking car, surrounded by crazies, with a dead bitch stuck in between you and your friend, upside down and shitting her pants in your fucking face, as if this shit wasn't bad enough as it is.
“Fuck you! Fuck you!” Dean screamed, punctuating each word with a blast from the .500 Smith and Wesson. One shot, by luck, hit a skinny eyeless woman in the guts, shot out of her back, and since the monsters were so close together, did the exact same thing to three more adults behind her. The damn gun had so much power, but now it was fucking empty.
Fuck!
“Reload!” Alex screamed. But there was no time for that. Dean turned in the seat and dug out a pump-action shotgun with pistol grips. As soon as he turned, a pair of scissors guided by a pair of bloody hands shot through the driver's side window. If Dean hadn't been wearing armor, it would have sank between his ribs. Instead, it merely skidded away and gave Dean enough time to turn back, pump a round in, and blow the grownup's arm off at the shoulder and send it spinning into the crowd.
Beside him, Alex fired into a mass at the front of the vehicle. Each round dropped a grownup like a sack of bricks, almost regardless of where the round hit. A head popped, another lost a jaw, another took two rounds, one in the heart and one in the lung, and sank out of sight. Alex's forearm burned with pain. The cut there radiated each time he moved, but he pushed those thoughts aside. He'd be lucky to get out of this with just a flesh wound. He'd be lucky to get out alive.
Killed by mindless savages, Alex thought. Somehow I knew it would come down to this. I just figured they'd be a mob of religious fanatics protesting science, and not a mob of...eyeless fanatics committing late...laaaaate term abortions.
A metal rake snaked in beside him. Alex leaned back just as a prong caught onto the grill of his football helmet. Oh shit, Alex thought as he felt himself being pulled out the window. His head and shoulders came out and he caught the glimpse of a baseball bat. Just a glimpse. A microsecond later, it cracked across the top of his helmet. His head rang. Even with the helmet, he'd never been hit so hard or been so stunned—not even when he fell off his bike and hit his forehead on the road.
Hands grabbed him. Alex felt his body come farther out the window. Dazed and seeing specks of black float through his vision, he tried to scream out to Dean, tried with all his might to hold himself in the car.
The bat struck him again. His helmet cracked.
Alex felt his brain rattle. For a moment, darkness overwhelmed him. Vertigo. Through the thrashing limbs around him, through the overpowering sound of Dean's shotgun and the static that poured out of the grownup's mouths, Alex remembered his father. Sitting on his father's lap, listening to his dad read stories. Remembered walking the creek with Jake and Dean and flipping through comics and looking up at the stars.
He saw his mother and remembered being so very, very small. Her smell, it was sweet, like spring and flowers and cookies and...
Alex realized he was going to die.
***
Jake threw out the kickstand on the bike and let it sit idling. He hopped off and drew his hatchet. “Come on!” Jake screamed, and ran forward firing the 9mm. “Take me! Motherfuckers! Over here! Take me!” Jake screamed. He poured shots into them, trying to put as many rounds into heads as he could manage. He was a mere twenty yards from their ranks, and some of them began to turn his way. “Come on, motherfuckers!”
Ghoulish adults jerked their heads towards him and stumbled over the bodies of their fallen. There was a pile surrounding the car (in some places four-deep). Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred littered the ground, and then as their numbers opened up, Jake caught a glimpse of the kid in the car.
It was Dean.
They locked eyes for a second, and Jake felt power pulse through his body. He's alive! My friend's alive! And then the adults fell back into step. A chunk of them pulled away from the horde and stomped towards Jake. He fired his pistol till it clicked empty, dropped the magazine out, reloaded, put a round in the chamber and began firing again. He pulled the trigger as fast as he could, peppering their bodies, holding his ground as they lurched closer.
Firing his pistol with one hand and swinging his hatchet with the other, Jake waded into them. He blew a woman's brains out point-blank. Blood splattered his face. His hatchet cleaved another ghoul's face open. A steak knife ripped across his chest, and Jake howled. An ice pick gouged at him, but he batted it away with the hatchet and blew a hole through the monster's smiling face. A snarling thing with a roast beef face shoved into him, trying to wrap him up in a bear hug, and Jake stumbled back, placed the gun under its chin, and blew a chunk out of the top of its skull.
A woman in yoga pants slapped his arm with the broad side of a shovel, and Jake almost dropped his pistol.
Pow!
Brains flew.
A guy with a handlebar mustache swung a piece of pipe at his head. Jake heard it whoosh over him as he ducked, and Jake came back up swinging the hatchet.
Ka-shink!
An arm came off.
They circled him.
“Take me!” Jake roared. “Take me!”
***
“ALEX!” Dean roared, and grabbed hold of his friend's belt. Dean placed his foot against the middle console and tried to pull him back in, but they were swarming him. They were going to tear him to pieces right in front of Dean's eyes.
“Noooooo!” Dean screamed and raised the shotgun with one hand. His finger almost pulled the trigger, but one of the adult's heads sprouted a flesh flower and blood sprayed out. Then another had a black hole punched into its skull and a spray of pink mist hit the air, then another, and another.
What the fu-Dean thought. Then it occurred to him that someone was shooting outside the car. Dean pulled with all his might, and this time Alex came back in, loose and rubbery like a doll. Dean fired a burst of buckshot
past Alex out into the crowd. Movement through the windshield caught his attention.
Two adults were trying to crawl in.
Somehow, through the chaos, Dean heard a voice, heard it say, “Get down!”
Dean pushed Alex into the floorboard as much as he could and then used his body to protect him. A hail of gunshots came in, one after the other. Behind Dean, the driver's door was ripped from its hinges. Dean turned, laid on his side and fired the shotgun into a huge obese man's chest. It was close enough that the buckshot had no time to separate, and it tore into the man like it was one solid round. The fat bastard stumbled back and collapsed onto two of his writhing brethren. Dean pumped the gun, and found it empty.
He heard the voice again. He thought it was talking to him at first, for it said, “Hey, over here!” Frantically, Dean reached into the back seat, searching for another weapon. He reached under his shield, under the arrows they had brought for Jake, and found the handle of something. Dean pulled it out from the pile and grimaced when he saw it was a little .22 pistol.
Oh fuck me...
That voice outside, overpowering everything, like the booming voice of a giant. “Take me! Motherfuckers! Over here! Take me!”
He turned back, and through the windshield he was finally able to see through the wall of adults. Dean didn't believe it. Maybe he was hallucinating. Maybe he'd been hit in the head too many times.
Is that...is that Jake?
A sudden powerful surge of hope shot through Dean then. Some of the adults at the front of the vehicle were actually turning away. Gunshots rang out, and a few of them dropped. It was Jake, and he was trying to get their attention.
Dean sprang into action. He slid the shield out of the back seat and shoved it down beside his seat and the door frame, creating a temporary blockage. Then he slid back into the driver’s seat. The car was still running; through all this chaos, the car was still idling. There was a break in the bodies ahead of him. He saw Jake clearly then, bloody and mad, howling and shooting and chopping like a tornado of steel and death.
Dean saw Jake's eyes go wide.
Then Dean slammed the car into reverse. The tires squealed, and for a moment the car did nothing. Ragged fingernails raked across Dean's cheek and neck and he grunted in pain. Then the tires caught, and the old car shot backwards and slammed into the adults behind them. Bodies were thrown back, and the monsters on the side stumbled and fell. Dean threw it back into drive and stomped on the gas.
***
Jake heard the car engine rev, heard the tires squeal. Hopefully the distraction was enough to get Dean free. The tires squealed louder, and then there was a sickly thump, and Jake saw ghouls spread out and fall as if they were dominoes or a ripple in water.
An old man, smiling with blood on his cheeks, with black and glistening-wet empty sockets shambled towards him. Jake put a bullet in his forehead, watched brains splatter out on the grownup behind it and then shot that one in the same fashion. Pow! A round caught a thin black woman in the cheek and spun her around. The grownup behind her tripped over her corpse, landed on his chest and looked up just in time for Jake to put a bullet in his mouth.
They were coming at him in a half-moon, trying to encircle him. In a second they'd be on him. Jake stumbled back and mounted the bike, his shirt cut open, his chest bleeding. He whipped the bike around and sped down the block, stopped and fired again, dropping two of them. He aimed for a man wearing only a bloody T-shirt and dirty underwear and socks.
The pistol clicked empty.
Fuck.
Jake slung the bow off his shoulder and drew an arrow. The missile zipped out a millisecond later and drove into a ghoul’s chest. He drew another and shot, drew another and shot, like a machine, like a water sprinkler of doom. There was no aiming, there was only instinct, and in two seconds Jake had fired three arrows and knocked each target onto its ass or back.
He heard tires squeal again, and through the wavering ghouls ahead of him, Jake saw the old car screeching through the smoke. Sickly thuds followed as it neared a pile of bodies that blocked the street. Adults once again tried to fall in around it, but with their numbers thinned, they bounced away or were thrown back with broken limbs.
Come on, you can make it!
The car plowed into the bodies strewn about the ground, and Jake's hope wavered. It didn't look like the car was going to clear the pile, but a second later, the tires bit down, ripped bodies apart like a grinding wheel, and climbed over their carcasses.
Sparks shot up under the frame as the car came down on the other side, and Dean didn't weave through the remaining numbers. He plowed straight ahead, eating bodies up with the old car like it was a hungry, hungry hippo.
“Yes!” Jake cheered, and then realized that if he didn't move, Dean was going to run his ass over as well. Jake hit the gas and spun the bike around, bouncing its back tire and taking the legs out of an adult who grasped a meat tenderizer. He shot forward just as Dean roared through and crushed the same grownup's head like a melon underneath the tire.
Powering down the street, Jake looked over his shoulder and saw Dean on his tail. The car was smoking and was beat to all hell. Every window was shattered, the driver's side door was missing. Blood and gore ran off the thing in streams. Jake motioned for Dean to follow him and turned forward. Behind them, a wave of adults poured out and filled up the street. When Jake looked in the side mirror, their figures were already growing tiny.
***
Ottoman's car broke down a mile from Jake's house. Something popped in the engine and a waft of smoke shot up, and she was done. Dean rolled the beast, clanking and clattering, onto the side of the road, and heard Alex scream.
Guess he's awake, Dean thought.
“Hey!” Dean yelled. “Alex, we made it! Shut the fuck up!”
Alex crawled up out of the floorboard frantically, looked around with wide eyes, and saw fields and trees and the sun winding itself down to the horizon. He turned, breathing heavily, and looked at Dean through his cracked football helmet. Dean's face was covered in blood, nail marks down one cheek, a cut under his eye.“Are we dead?” he asked.
“Just about,” Dean grunted, then pulled the shield away from the missing door, grabbed his helmet, and stumbled out of the car. Smoke poured back in from the engine. Alex coughed and then crawled out after him. When he stood, he saw Jake pull a U-turn on a dirt bike and head back towards them.
“Jake!” Alex called out. Then looked around again, bewildered. “How did we get here?”
Dean ran his fingers across his face and winced. He looked down, saw a tooth sticking out of his bicep, and shivered and plucked it out. Blood immediately oozed up. He was numb, and so tired, but answered Alex anyway.
“Jake came back for us,” Dean said. “He distracted them, helped us get through.”
The bike sputtered and Jake pulled to a stop in front of his friends. Looking at Dean in the open was utterly surreal. He was dressed like a Spartan (and looked the part with all the blood). Alex was wearing a cracked football helmet and a tactical vest. They were both bleeding from various cuts, but...
...they were alive.
Jake looked past them, back towards town. They'd escaped the adults, outran them. But for how long? He looked back to his friends and grinned. “Hey guys,” he said. “What ya been up to?”
Dean grinned back and put his helmet on. He thought to himself, If only I coulda worn this thing in the damn car, fuck, I would barely have a scratch. “Oh, you know,” Dean said, “killing people, robbing shit.”
Jake stepped off the bike. His chest burned from a cut, and each time the breeze blew through his shirt, he gritted his teeth as it caressed his open skin. Alex unstrapped his helmet, looked down at the crack running along the top, and felt his head. “Somebody hit me with a bat,” he said and dropped it beside him. “I'm still a little fuzzy. Please tell me this is a nightmare.”
“It's a nightmare,” Jake and Dean answered him simultaneously.
&
nbsp; They looked at each other, smiled and broke into laughter. Dean grabbed them both and hugged them, and they hugged him back. They stood there for a moment like that, laughing, wrapped up and bleeding on each other. Behind them, smoke from a dead city rose up and mingled with the clouds. In the distance, gunshots could be heard. Somewhere in town, other kids were still fighting, struggling to survive.
Jake wished them luck.
Alex looked up and asked, “You do that?”
“Do what?” Jake replied. He dropped away from the group hug and turned around, leaving Alex leaning on Dean. Over the trees, up on the water tower, Jake could see tiny figures. Behind them, painted across the blue metal, read a message:
KIDS SAFE HERE.
“Oh,” Jake said. “I asked Randy to paint that up there.”
“Who's Randy?” Dean asked.
“Neighbor kid,” Jake said. “I saved a…never mind, long story. I'll tell you when we get back.”
Dean caught sight of a rooster tail of dust coming down the road. He squinted his eyes and saw a pickup truck coming their way. “We got company,” Dean said, and wandered back to Ottoman's car. He reached in the back seat and pulled out an AK-47 and leaned it against the car, then pulled out another gun, and then another.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jake blurted. “Where the hell did you get those!?”
“Pawn shop,” Alex said matter-of-factly.
Jake looked in the backseat and shook his head. Arrows and dozens of guns and bows and swords and...were those nunchaku?
Beside him, Dean said, “More in the trunk.” Then racked a round into the AK.
“Nice,” Jake said and picked up a rifle, as did Alex. Together they chambered rounds into their weapons. They stood in the street side by side and watched the white pickup truck roll their way. Thirty yards out and it came to a stop. A tense moment fell over them as they raised their guns.
Then Jake laughed and lowered his weapon.
