Hissers II: Death March (10 page)

Just then the back door broke open and a man with a blood-stained face and a second tongue stuck to his neck came racing rig
ht for them. Amanita screamed. Doug swung open the door to the basement and ushered her down. He shut it and bolted it just as the hisser hit the other side and began beating on it.

“Go down to the back,” he ordered
, “there’s a bulkhead. We’ll run out to the truck while they’re inside.”

Amanita raced
across the basement to the bulkhead stairs and stopped.  “We’re going the wrong way! The truck is back near the garage, at the other end of the house! This’ll put us on the wrong side.”

“We’re
just gonna have to run. Just don’t look back. We can make it.”

“
Are you nuts? We’ll never make it,” she cried. All she could think of now was how badly it was going to hurt to be torn apart and eaten. “We can’t outrun them.”

“
Yes we can. They only run as fast as humans. Be squirrely, juke back and forth like a wide receiver, you can get around them.”

“I don’t play football, Doug!”

More fists were banging on the cellar door now. They could hear the frantic racing about of the hungry undead upstairs.

“No time to argue, Am. Just run as fast as you can.
Look out.” Doug pushed past her and undid the inside latch to the bulkhead doors. “On three we run. Got me?”

Shaking, the pipe held tightly to her chest, she nodded yes.

“One, two, three!” Doug flung the doors up and open. The morning sun blasted down like an interrogator’s spotlight, almost blinding them.

At the same time, Amanita heard the basement door buckle and heard the
slap slap slap
of hordes of feet racing down to get them. She ran up behind Doug and screamed. The rest of the hissers were outside in the back yard and they were coming right for them, racing across the dead, overgrown grass, through the little vegetable garden someone had planted, leaping over an outdoor table and chairs. She swung the pipe at the closest one and caught him in the head, knocking him down. Doug’s shovel caught the next one in the neck, cutting the head clean off. Behind them hissers were sprinting across the basement. She could see the truck poking out from the far side of the house, but there were at least ten hissers coming for her, and more coming up from the basement.

“Over the fence,” Doug said, turning and grabbing her arm, pushing her toward the neighbor’s fence behind them
, away from the truck. As if she weighed nothing more than a feather, he hoisted her up to the top, where she grabbed hold and dropped to the other side. “Run!” he shouted. “Just run!”

“Doug!”

“Run, Am!”

She couldn’t see through the slats of the fence, but she heard him swinging his shovel, heard the hissers taking him down, and through tears and sobs she
turned and ran through the new yard behind her. Past a birdbath, past a rusted swing set, to the next fence, which she climbed. At the top she looked back across the yards, back to where a collection of hissers was trying to get over the first fence to get to her. She didn’t see Doug anywhere.

They got him, she thought, the bastards got him.

She dropped down to a side yard lined with bushes and saw a street before her. More houses across it. She ran to a tree and looked out at the street, tried to find a safe way to get anywhere away from the hissers.

There! Three or four blocks down. A
cargo van, and it was moving. Someone was alive and driving! She looked back at the fence, waiting for Doug to come climbing over it, but he didn’t. She couldn’t wait for him, not now, not with some many undead in the neighborhood. It pained her to do it, but she broke from the tree and raced toward the van.

She waved her arms and screamed with all her voice. “Hey! Over here! Help me! Over here!”

Behind her now she heard the sound of hissers giving chase. She risked a look back and saw a small pack of them running out onto the street, coming right for her. They were drenched in blood and smeared in dirt and their bodies were an amalgam of all sorts of extra body parts. The one in the lead dressed in a police uniform.

Nausea rose in her stomach as
she ran, her legs burning. “Heeeellp!”

Miraculously, the van turned, started coming for her, picking up speed. She saw the side door slide open and a man lean out. He stuck his arm out, hand spread wide.
Behind her the sound of the hisser grew closer. And just as she felt those undead fingers touching her hair, the van blew right by her, and the man’s muscular arm yanking her inside as the swarm of hissers collided with the front of the van, exploding in red gore.

Am was flung to the floor as the van turned and fought its way free of the undead climbing on it.
It rolled over their bodies like they were speedbumps.

“Goddamn that was messy!” said the driver. “Fuckers won’t get outta the way. Hang on!”

The van slewed sideways again and Amanita rolled across something soft, what felt like a mattress, hit her head on a spare tire rim.

“Yee haw!” screamed the man in the back with her
as he held onto the ceiling for support. And now for the first time she looked up and saw his face. Saw his beard and long hair and the Harley Davidson bandana he wore wrapped around it. A scar ran under his chin like a thick vein. He was missing his two front teeth and had a tattoo of a spider on his neck. “Hang on, girlie,” he told her, all the while smiling like this was some amusement park ride.

The van lurched up and down as it ran over more undead, then took a corner somewhere before
settling out and moving forward without incident.

“What do we got?” the driver yelled back.
He was wearing a dirty white cowboy hat with specks of blood on it.

Spider Neck looked at Amanita and
massaged his beard. “Got us a poor little girl,” he said, almost to himself. “Hey there, girl, you didn’t get bit did you? Can’t have you spreading diseases.”

Amanita shuddered. It was cold and dark in the back of the van.
The mattress on the floor was covered in dark stains. “No,” she replied, not taking her eyes off the man, even as his own eyes dipped down to her chest and legs.

“Well alright then. I’d call that a good save. Where
you headed?”

“W
est. But we have to go back. My friend—”

“Is dead. Trust me. You didn’t see all of what was behind you. That place was overrun. We didn’t grab you right then you’d be dead too.

“Then you can just drop me off here. I’m fine now. I have other friends waiting for me.”

“Nonsense,” said Spider Neck. “
You’re not hearing me. Any friends you got out there are dead. That whole neighborhood is swarmed. All of it. It’s a dead zone now. But as luck would have it, we’re heading west too. So you just ride with us, okay?”

Something was unsettling about this guy’s voice, and Amanita didn’t like the
glint in his eyes. Sure, she’d endured men looking at her this way for a while now, but not like this. Not in the back of a van with a man who looked like an ex con from a bad TV show.

“I’d rather not,” she said, and stood up, reaching for the door handle.

Spider Neck’s hand came down on hers and engulfed it. “Not a wise idea. At this speed you’d be splattered on the road. Why don’t you just sit here and relax. We ain’t gonna harm you. Lessen you give us a reason to, you know, like making noise that attracts them dead things. But you seem like a nice little lady, so just sit tight and we’ll get you out west. C’mon now, look me in the eye. Ain’t nothing gonna happen here ’cept us driving. There you go. Good girl. Lemme see that backpack. C’mon now. Give it here.”

Reluctantly, she handed it over. “It’s just food.”
She tried to hide the lie in her voice. True, it was mostly food, but it also held a Swiss Army knife, gauze and a small bottle of peroxide.

“So it is,” Spider Neck
said, opening it up, then closing it again. Somehow he’d missed seeing the knife, which was probably buried under the water bottle. With that, he climbed up front and sat in the passenger seat next to the driver.

This was not a good situation, she knew. These two guys were not here to
help her. They were not good people like Doug. They were not even the military, who may have been apathetic toward her but at least weren’t creepy and potentially dangerous. And Spider Neck was right, at the speed they were going, she’d die trying to jump out.

She sat on the
stained mattress, her back against the wheel well, and tried not to scream as she shook from the van’s cold interior.

FRIDAY, 12:17 PM

Driving through the farmlands turned out to be quite peaceful. Except every once in a while Olive would take a back road past a cattle farm where the poor cows had been slaughtered
, most likely by their owners having been turned into hissers; the smell, already thick from manure, now mixed with the offal, was almost strong enough to induce vomiting, even with the car windows rolled up.

On Wednes
day they’d traded the Charger for a small Jetta they’d found parked on the side of the road with the keys still in it, the driver’s door wide open as if to say, come get me, no one else is using me. No corpses had been found around it so it was safe to assume the driver had either freaked out and run off into the surrounding fields or had been turned. Maybe gone off and killed more cows.

They spent the last two nights in a rest stop bathroom
while Olive’s knees healed up. It smelled pretty bad inside, an aromatic mixture of piss, trash, mold, and urinal cakes, but the building was made of concrete and the metal doors locked from the inside. A small window led out to a dumpster, so there was an escape route if they needed one. But they had not seen or heard any hissers in all that time. The vending machines outside were out of power but together they were able to break them open and get some more crackers and soda to kill the boredom.

“Figured I’d lose weight during the apocalypse,” Olive said. “But I think I’m getting fatter.”

“I miss playing Soccer,” Connor replied, commenting on his own lack of exercise lately. He squeezed his stomach, but it was obvious to him he
was
getting skinnier.

Now, as they continued their drive west
into barren land that was slowly turning into desert, Connor stuck his hand out the car window and let it swim up and down on the hot air current. There was still nothing but static on the radio, so Olive hummed an old Beatles tune he’d heard before, the one about buying love or something. Or maybe not buying love. Either way it was familiar.

Then, overhead, he saw something that made him take a moment’s pause. It was a fighter jet, but it wasn’t American. It flew low and Connor could see the Union Jack painted on its tail.

“Look, it’s a German jet.”

Olive looked up through the windshield. “You sure? Looks like any other jet.”

“See the super pointy nose cone. That’s Luftwaffe. We must have gotten word out to our allies.”

“Germany flew here?”

“They have bases in Mexico. Least they did in my air combat game.”

“Well it’s about fucking time we get some help.”

“Yeah.” But then Connor remembered how the US fighter jets had blown up Castor and he wasn’t so sure it mattered that the Germans had arrived. As far as he could tell the country was going to hell in a handbasket by the hour and what could the Germans do but quarantine the entire continent.

He dwelled
on this as they continued, wondering what would be done to the country if everyone finally turned. Would the Brits come reclaim it, make jokes about how the Revolutionary War had been for naught? Or maybe the entire European Union would just divvy up the land.

Some minutes later
, they passed a truck driving toward them, going in the opposite direction.

“Slow down,” Connor said.
“We should talk to whoever it is?”

“
You think? Do you have your gun?”

“Why?”

“I dunno. Hard to trust people. Could be he’s one of them things.”

“They don’t drive. Just slow down and wave. If he’s coming this way it might mean the road ahead is blocked or something.”

“We could use some information, that’s for sure. Just have your gun ready.”

Connor put his gun in his lap. “
Got it right here.”

Olive pulled the car onto the side of the road,
put it in park, and got out. The truck was getting closer, a beat up old F-150 with a rusted red cap on back. She waved her arms, and the truck began to slow. It pulled up on the other side of the road and stopped. Connor could see a man in a trucker cap in the driver’s seat. He opened the door and stepped out. As he shut the door and made his way over, Connor could see a little girl sitting in the passenger street. She was holding a doll and singing.

The man held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, though the .44 magnum gun in his belt was as plain as day. Connor pressed the safety off on his own gun, stuck it in his front
pant pocket, then got out of his door and stood on the other side of the car opposite Olive.