Rowan finally stood up straight, a hand on his aching chest, and turned to Lonnie. He waited for the only two things that made any sense in that chaotic, upside down world—Lonnie’s word and his direction.
The silence hung in the thick air as the stocky golden-haired man assessed the situation. If they moved stealthily up to the wreck and searched for any survivors, it could go one of three ways—they find someone alive and help them, they find someone dead or a zombie and leave them, or they find nothing and move on. Those were best case scenarios. If they found a zombie, it could attract the other one from up the road and from the woods. Same with an injured person who was in too much pain to keep their cries of agony to themselves.
Lonnie wiped the “what ifs” clear away. He’d had enough listening to the chatter in his mind. It was time to follow his instincts.
“Let’s go check it out,” he said in a low, steady voice before he took off in a jog again.
Rowan cursed under his breath but followed none the less, his hand never leaving his aching chest.
As they approached the rear end of the car, the shadowed figure up ahead snapped out of its daze and turned slowly, one of its legs bent awkwardly, giving it a prominent limp as it tried to take a step forward.
The two men squatted by the taillights and waited. Nothing could be heard over the sound of their heavy breathing. Thirty seconds later, Lonnie peeked his head around the car. The shadowed figure was gone.
“Shit,” he breathed out. “Let’s make this quick.”
He stood up, rifle gripped in both hands at his chest, finger just outside the trigger, and peered through the busted windows of the vehicle.
The backseat was clear. Nothing but an empty Big Gulp from Seven-Eleven and a crumpled up McDonald’s bag. He moved catlike sideways, one foot crossed over the other to the driver’s side window.
The front seat was clear as well. The seatbelt had been ripped in half and blood stained the cloth and dashboard, but there were no bodies.
“Goddammit!” Lonnie banged his fist on the bent door.
Rowan flinched and then turned in a circle, his eyes squinted to see through the darkness. “Maybe we should keep it down. We don’t know how many are close by.”
“What’s the fucking point? They’re going to find us anyway.” Lonnie’s head shook slowly on his thick neck as he stared at the dried, bloody fingerprints wrapped around the steering wheel.
Rowan clamped his mouth shut and took a steadying breath through his nostrils. He let the 9 mm fall to his side. His elbow joints stung once they were fully extended, reminding him how long he’d been running with it stiffly bent. “Should we find another house to lay low in for the night? Lonnie?”
The Army washout didn’t say anything in response. He let his eyes drift over the scene of the wreck, from the bloodied inside, to the smear on the outside door handle, down to the disturbances in the grass and dirt that lead away into the woods.
Rowan’s voice flowed through the air and into Lonnie’s ears, only registering in his brain once silence had returned.
“You OK, man?” Rowan reached out to touch Lonnie’s shoulder.
“What? Yeah. I’m fine. We should look for another place off the grid to lay low for the night.”
Rowan took his hand back and narrowed his eyes as he scrutinized his companion and savior. “…OK…sounds good.”
“Let’s get on with it before that fucker circles back around and makes a midnight snack of us.”
All at once, Rowan felt eyes on the back of his neck, watching him, studying him, following him. He looked over his shoulder, but all he saw was the black void of the wooded tree line fifteen feet behind him. The hairs stood up on the nape of his neck. His next breath got caught in his lungs and he stifled a cough. When he turned back around Lonnie was already on the other side of the two lane highway, ready to disappear into the wooded abyss.
“Wait up!” he yelled in a whisper and ran to catch up.
Whatever was behind them, he wanted to get as far away from it as possible.
XVIII.
The night was eerily silent without the usual whoosh of cars passing by. Summer crickets chirped from all around and the cicadas sang a buzzing crescendo. Far away from the town of Chesterton, heat lightening danced across the sky quietly. Two tired men walked along the side of highway twelve inside the tree line, hidden from anything that might be lurking out on the road.
“I know there’s a house ‘round here somewhere. I’ve seen it a million times,” Lonnie grumbled as he trudged, each step cracking and crunching over the brush and brambles.
“Maybe we got turned around somewhere,” Rowan offered from close behind him.
Lonnie turned his face up to the sky and took a deep breath, the silver moon painted across his tanned face like a spotlight waiting for a monologue. It would wait forever. Lonnie had nothing to say, at least not until they found the house he knew was there, somewhere.
“So, we’re looking for more people, right?” Rowan spoke up, his tone uncertain. When Lonnie didn’t say anything he pressed on with the questions, despite the gnawing feeling in his stomach. “What are we going to do once we find them? I mean, y’know, what’s the plan once we—” He ran into Lonnie’s sturdy frame and ricocheted backwards. “Whoa, man. What’s going on?”
Rowan’s mouth hung open as he gazed over Lonnie’s wide head.
They found the house. It was in a clearing up ahead, about a quarter mile back from the main road…and it was overrun with the dead.
“We should go,” he whispered into Lonnie’s burning ears.
Lonnie shushed him.
“But there’s no way we can—”
“Would you shut the fuck up and listen…”
Both men faced the house, a hill for the tiny ants to converge at like a homing beacon. Through the endless stream of throaty, hungry moans and growls something else carried on the breeze just barely—something human.
Lonnie’s ice blue eyes widened to the size of a full moon. Without a word, he took off into the clearing.
Somewhere behind him he heard Rowan pleading for him to come back, proclaiming that it was suicide, begging him not to do what he was already doing. In defiance, his legs pumped at an alarming rate, the muscles so tight he thought they would explode. The hard metal of the AR-15 slapped against his back. The distant voice grew in volume and urgency as he approached the outer ring of the nightmarish ghouls.
“Shit! Help! Help me!” a young man’s voice echoed out through a missing window. “I don’t wanna die!”
The horde of undead went back ten deep and spread out to encircle the house from all sides. There was a loud crash of glass breaking and an indistinct cry from somewhere inside. Lonnie’s stomach lurched with every inch he drew closer to the first mangled, lumbering body. He could die trying to save whoever was trapped inside, and he had to be OK with that. He
was
OK with that.
Though his body panged him from every end as it tried to kick into its survivalist instincts and flee, he fought it all the way up to when he collided with the back of just one of the few dozen spongey figures that would soon surround him.
XIX.
There was no plan as Lonnie Lands charged the multitude of hungry, drooling zombies. The rational part of his brain had shut down completely. All that was left were primordial instincts to preserve mankind. He propelled ahead, as if thrown from a slingshot, with his upper half leaning forward, ready for impact.
The first body flew off its feet and landed face down when Lonnie threw his shoulder into it. He pushed forward without a pause. All the neighboring dead turned their heads slowly on creaking necks to look for the cause of the commotion, but Lonnie was already ahead of them. They spun on wobbly legs, their searching eyes glazed over, their mouths stupidly pendulous as they drooled.
Arms reached out from every angle to grab onto the blurred form that moved like a stroke of paint through the nighttime scenery. The only thing solidifying the man’s existence was the trail of trodden corpses struggling to right themselves again. Their cold, hard fingers brushed against his warm flesh, but couldn’t grasp onto it. Strained hissing emitted from their cracked, white lips that sounded like a group of angry cats.
Lonnie was halfway through the pack when he noticed he was no longer approaching oblivious bodies with their backs turned, but bloodied, disfigured faces. They were ready for him, feet planted on the lawn, weight distributed unevenly, but firmly between bent legs, arms stretched outward as their fingers clenched and opened perilously, their mouths already working in a chewing motion in wait for the thick blood they craved.
He couldn’t slow down just because the tides had turned and he was no longer moving in stealth. Fear couldn’t cripple him, though it did stifle his breathing and stiffen his joints so that every movement he made was an agonizing, and possibly futile, effort.
As if in slow motion, he approached the grasping hands. Behind them were mouths full of blackened teeth that dripped tar-like blood. Another cry from inside the house urged him forward. He closed his eyes moments before he jumped with reckless abandonment into the undulating sea of groping dead bodies.
The hands of the dead were all over Lonnie Lands. They tugged at his wife beater, his jeans, his arms, his hair, anything they could get their relentless fingers clasped around. He felt warm liquid smear across his unprotected body, unsure if it was his blood or theirs, and unwilling to stop to find out.
The sound of jaws snapping within inches of his finely tuned ears was the only thing that kept him pushing forward. The weight of body parts wrapped around his legs slowed him down from a run to a strained wide walk. Pinching pain shot up his limbs and fueled the fire of panic in his brain.
That was that. It was over. He’d gotten himself stuck and there was no way he would get out of it. He would fight to the end, but deep down he knew it
was
the end as their mouths pulled closer to his tender flesh.
He couldn’t take them all on. There were three that clung to him as more figures slowly made their way over. He would be dogpiled to death and torn apart. How long did it take to die he wondered again—a minute, two, ten? He hadn’t stuck around to find out when Torres was ripped apart. Now that he was in the same situation, he wish he had.
A misplaced sound cracked through the thick summer air. The ravenous jaws of the zombies stopped clacking for a moment as their heads turned to the source from the woods. Even Lonnie, with his blood bursting through his veins and his ears ringing with the ghostly, disembodied moans, couldn’t help pausing for a second to look. Another crack echoed out.
Gunfire.
He squinted, but all he saw was the waving blades of grass and the rustling blackened branches of the silhouettes of trees.
One. Two. Three. Four. One after another the shots popped off, pulling the centralized focus of the zombies away from the bag of flesh in their hands.
A figure burst forth from the woods and waved its arms through the air. “Hey! Over here! Over here, dumb shits!”
The bodies on the outer edge of the horde broke off and followed the shadowed movement instinctively. Their chests deflated with heavy moans as they trudged forward, away from the house.
The next row turned, their alabaster eyes watching as if they had the capacity to process what they were seeing. In reality their limbs, already stiff with rigor mortis, were just gearing up for the movement it took to make the change in direction toward the new, more lively prey.
Lonnie remained frozen with mottled hands still clenched around his wrists and legs. He didn’t dare move as the focus switched from him to Rowan. He didn’t even breathe, though the stench of the bodies was so thick he could taste it.
Several ramshackle bodies pulled themselves out through the broken windows of the house and fell to the front porch. With greatly strained effort they pushed themselves up on their hands to stand again, their backs hunched and their spines disfigured. Gradually, Lonnie felt the release of pressure around his limbs as the rest of the herd mindlessly followed the others back into the woods.
For a fleeting moment, when there was no longer the heavy scent of rotting flesh engulfing him and he could catch a breath of fresh air, Lonnie felt a drop in his stomach and wondered if he’d ever see Rowan again. It was only for a second that he felt the queasiness of dread for his companion before he turned and ran up the porch steps and through the front door. With the hinges already twisted and broken, it crashed to the floor easily. He bounded inside as he scanned the darkened room for the young man in need.