Plague Nation (25 page)

“Hey, this bitch has a gun!”

Someone slammed into me—hard—causing me to fall backward against the Acura. My head hit the upper doorframe just hard enough to rattle my teeth and make me see stars, but not hard enough to get me to let go of my rifle as the person tried to yank it out of my hands.

I shook my head, told the stars to fuck off, and focused.

“Let go of it and I won’t hurt you.” But a beefy man in a Giants T-shirt and matching baseball cap shoved his bulk up against me, exhaling beer breath into my face. Guess it’d been Miller time before he’d hit the road.

“You really didn’t have to call me a bitch,” I growled, putting the side of the rifle against his chest and giving a push that sent him flying back into two similarly reeky guys right behind him. All three stumbled back against the tide of people trying to fight their way onto the bridge. I took advantage of the moment to level the business end of the rifle at them.

“If you’re smart, you’ll get the hell off this road and find shelter until the military can get you out of here,” I said. “If you’re stupid, you’ll keep trying to fuck with me, and you won’t have to worry about what’s coming up that road.”

All three of them lunged forward.

Did no one pay attention to the Darwin Awards any more?

I slammed the butt of the rifle into the first guy’s jaw. He collapsed, poleaxed. His two friends caught him before he hit the ground.

Now will you give me some fighting room?

A mob of people surged into the space between the Acura and the adjacent line of vehicles, shoving the two jerks forward, right into me. I ended up squashed against the Acura again. One of the beer-infused males took advantage of the crush to grab the stock of my rifle, wrenching it out of my hands. The sling yanked my arm out and up, the sturdy nylon strap wrapped tightly around my wrist. It hurt like hell, but stopped the guy from taking off with my weapon.

He swore and yanked again, trying to get the rifle free and giving me a nice rope burn as the nylon dragged around my wrist. Grabbing a length of the strap with both hands, I yanked back.

As we wrestled for possession of the rifle, I became aware of a new sound—a weird rhythmic crunching thud, as if someone was jumping on a metal trampoline. Both the man and I paused in our tug-of-war as the sound grew closer.

Crunch.

Five cars ahead of the Acura, someone was running on top of the stopped vehicles, barely pausing as he went from car top to trunk to hood, as if each surface was just a springboard for the next point of contact. If Gabriel had made it look easy, this guy made it appear effortless, going from SUV to Smart to Honda without any apparent trouble—despite the difference in shapes and sizes.

“What the hell?” The man trying to wrestle my rifle away from me just stopped and stared.

Almost as if he was aware he had an audience, the guy looked over in our direction as he leapt—graceful as a cat—from the back of a Prius onto the hood of a Toyota. He paused long enough for me to get a good look at him, almost as if he was posing for a picture.

Brown hair flopped over a red bandana knotted behind his head, fair-colored skin flushed red with the exercise. Brown eyes with a crazy gleam in them. Not psycho crazy, but “boy, isn’t this just the best fun ever” type crazy, with an exhilarated grin to top it off. Kind of like Lil’s “isn’t it fun to kill zombies!” expression.

And then he was moving again, hitting three or four more cars before landing on the ground on the Presidio side, and vanishing into the deepening shadows of the trees.

“Who was that masked man?” I said to myself. Shaking my head, I turned back to business at hand. I gave my opponent what a Scottish friend of mine called “a mou’ful o’ headies” by way of bashing him in the nose with my forehead. He howled in pain and let go of the rifle.

I followed up with the butt of the weapon to his stomach and turned to the remaining man, who was smart enough to keep his hands to himself.

“Take your friends and get the hell off the streets,” I warned him. Without waiting to see if he listened, I pushed past, shoving my way through a totally panicked river of people, scrambling over a Saturn, and finally making my way to the far side of the road, where Lil bounced up and down like Tigger on speed. The rest had already gone.

“Being Tail End Charlie sucks,” I said.

“Or maybe you just suck at being Tail End Charlie.” Lil’s tone was caustic, and I looked at her with surprised hurt. “You’re not supposed to stop and help people right now,” she snapped. “We
can’t
help them. We have to keep moving, or you could die!”

“Well, I’m not dead, and I moved as fast as I could.” I kept my voice level. “They were pulling a little girl out of a car, Lil. I had to do something.” She turned away from me and I reached out, putting a hand on her shoulder. “You would have done the same thing, and you know it. And I’d be where you are, ripping you a new one for scaring the shit out of me.”

“Well... yeah!” Lil glared back at me.

“So we’d better catch up with the rest of the gang, or Gabriel’s gonna chew my ass, too. And yours, for letting Dr. Crazy Pants out of your sight.”

“Oh, crap.” Lil looked guiltily over her shoulder. “You’re right. Let’s go!”

We darted into the trees. I silently hoped for the best for everyone stuck in the traffic jam, knowing that I could have stayed there and used all my ammo, and people would still die. We had to set up the lab and find the cure if we wanted to make a real difference.

“Ohmygod, I am sta-a-arving!”

Ted’s stomach rumbled, as if to punctuate his words. Kim’s growled by way of reply. They’d been on the road for hours, with only a brief bathroom break at a truck stop somewhere between Albuquerque and the Texas border.

The twins grinned at each other.

“Calico County?” they said in unison.

Calico County in Amarillo, Texas, was a traditional way station on their yearly cross-country drive from Los Angeles to Michigan to visit their folks. Right off the highway, Calico County served home-style southern food including catfish, fried okra, and baskets of miniature sweet and savory rolls. Kim always stole the cinnamon rolls right away, but Ted didn’t mind, because the waitress brought refills every time she came to the table. Hometown cooking, smiling staff, and cheap prices. It almost made the twins reconsider their attitude toward Texas.

Almost.

“Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we
—”

Kim reached out and thwacked Ted on the back of his head, keeping her other hand firmly on the wheel.

“You’re dealing with a woman with low blood sugar, who’s running on five hours’ sleep, max. Do you really want to piss me off?”

As
if in accordance with her mood, the threatening thunderclouds overhead made good their promise and started dumping a shitload of rain, accompanied by cracks of thunder and flashes of lightning.

Ted laughed and shook his head.

“Sorry, sis, I
—”

“What the hell?”

His reply was cut off by Kim’s sudden expletive. She jerked the wheel and the car swerved across the I-40, which was luckily empty behind them.

She brought the Corolla under control, knuckles white on the wheel as she pulled back over to the right side of the highway.

“Did you see that?”

“Huh?” he said. “See what?”

“That thing on the road!” Kim stabbed her finger in an indeterminate direction. “Didn’t you see it?”

Ted looked back and saw a lot of rain, and very little else.

“Jeez, Kim, your blood sugar is for shit.”

“I’m serious! There was someone in the road. Right in the middle of the fucking highway!”

Ted rolled his eyes.

“Are you going all
Jeepers Creepers
on me? ’Cause I do not want to have my eyes removed by an underwear-sniffing monster.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I didn’t say that,” he replied, choosing his words carefully. “I just didn’t see anything.”

“Which automatically means I’m imagining things?”

Ted considered his options. If he said “No,” she’d ream him for the next hour or two. If he said “yes,” he’d have to listen to whatever bullshit she thought she’d seen.

“What exactly did you see?”

Better to humor her than put up with her hostile sulking for the next few hours. No one could sulk with more hostility than his sister. She had refined it to an art.

“A woman crossing the freeway,” she said. “Looked like a crack whore.”

“So where did she go?”

Kim shrugged, the motion not needing the middle finger to convey the “fuck you” that lay behind it.

“How the hell should I know? I was busy trying to keep the car on the road!”

Ted chose to keep quiet until he saw a sign for Julian Blvd-Paramount Blvd exit, a quarter mile up the road.

“There’s the exit,” he said.

“Thank god.” Kim merged over onto the frontage road, turning right onto Paramount. “Almost there.” The restaurant was up ahead on the right a few hundred yards distant, almost impossible to miss because of the two huge signs shaped like canning jars, towering in the middle of the parking lot. The sign on the right depicted canned peaches, the words “Calico County Restaurant” stamped across it, while the second showed canned green beans, proclaiming “Home Cookin’ Good!”

No lies there. Ted looked up as they neared the parking lot. One of the two quaint old-fashioned streetlamps on either side of the entrance flickered on and off, and the other was completely out. The restaurant itself looked dark inside.

Ted frowned.

“Well, shit, are they even open?”

“They have to be!” Kim scowled as she pulled into the lot. “It’s only eight thirty.”

“Maybe the electricity went out,” Ted said as another jagged bolt of lighting arced through the sky, followed by a window-rattling thunderclap.

“God, I hope not! Because I would seriously kill for some fried okra.”

The man who lurched in front of the car came out of nowhere. The bumper of the Corolla smashed into him before Kim could react. She shrieked in shock as blood splattered onto the windshield. Then she slammed on the brakes hard enough to knock the air out of both of them as their seatbelts did the job of stopping them from going through the windshield.

The car screeched to a halt. Kim turned the key as soon as she’d recovered her breath, cutting the engine off in mid-sputter. The sound of rain splattering on the roof was suddenly deafening, thousands of leaden fingers tapping the metal above their heads.

Kim unfastened her seatbelt, and Ted grabbed her arm as she fumbled for the door latch.

“What are you doing?”

“I just hit someone,” she said. She jerked her arm away and glared at her brother. “I need to see if he’s still alive.” She opened the car door and jumped out, rain sluicing down and flattening her curls.

Even with the driving rain, Ted got a good look at the man staggering to his feet in front of the car, as the headlights illuminated his torn, blood-stained jeans and Western-style shirt, light reflecting off the shiny buttons. Ted could see how many pieces were missing from his body, and the vacantly hungry look in his milky eyes as he honed in on Kim.

“Oh god...”

Ted shoved the passenger door open and started to jump out, but was halted by his seatbelt.

“Shit!” He fumbled with the clasp, fingers clumsy with fear as raindrops splattered against him. What took a few seconds seemed like the work of hours as he finally disengaged the locking mechanism and stumbled out of the car, still woozy from the jolting stop. Rounding the front of the car, he saw Kim reaching for the man
—
thing
—
she’d hit, as it in turn reached greedy hands toward her.

“Kim, no! Get away from him!”

Even as Ted cried out his warning, Kim grasped the man by his shoulders to help him up. The man wrapped his hands around one of her wrists, hoisting himself up even as he sunk his teeth into her forearm.

Kim shrieked in surprise and pain as she tried to pull away from her attacker. Ted wrapped his arms around his twin’s torso and yanked backward. He heard an audible ripping sound as a chunk of Kim’s flesh tore out, eliciting an agonized wail from his sister.

A low moaning from the far end of the parking lot caught Ted’s attention as he half-dragged Kim away from her attacker, who chewed mindlessly on the bloody hunk of meat left between his teeth.

“You mother-fucking bastard!” Ted slammed a closed fist into the man’s nose, feeling the bones shatter beneath his hand. The man toppled over onto the ground, still chewing.

“Ted, it hurts, it really hurts...”

He turned back to his sister as blood spurted from the wound on her arm.

“We’ve got to get you to a doctor, okay?”

More moans sounded from the edge of the parking lot, spread around the entire perimeter. Ted looked up and saw indistinct figures lurching and staggering out of the shadows as the one light flickered on and off.

“What the fuck?”

He started to half-carry Kim back to the car when a flicker of movement in one of the restaurant windows caught his eye. There was someone in there. And they’d have a phone and could call 911 and get an ambulance out here a lot quicker than he could find a hospital in the torrential downpour.

Changing direction, Ted dragged Kim over to the red double doors under the shelter of the overhanging awning, trying to ignore the fucked up druggies slowly heading toward them. Reaching the doors, he grabbed one of the handles and tugged.

Nothing.

He tried pushing, but no success there either. The doors were locked from the inside.