“I know.”
The men in the cells were in a panic; they had nowhere to go and only to die, which would happen very soon. The barred door began to rattle loose from the banging force of the mob.
The first key Milla tried didn’t work. She tried the next, but fumbled and dropped the keys.
“Fuck!” she exclaimed.
“Baby! Baby! Come on!” Derek shot out.
“I know!”
The first of the barred door’s two thick hinges bent until it snapped.
She picked up the keys, but lost her place and had to start over…
The barred door’s last hinge was quickly failing…
Some of the dead were so desperate to get in they actually pushed themselves through the steel bars—damaging their heads as they squeezed in between the bars—tearing off their faces as they howled and screeched with blood-slicked insanity.
Milla tried another key. It didn’t work…
The door’s last hinge twisted and broke off.
The dead flooded the cellblock.
Milla tried a last key as she glanced at oncoming death with terror-widened eyes…
It worked.
She swung the door open and quickly closed it behind her—it locked into place just as the dead reached it.
“Fuck!” Milla shouted in frustration as she threw herself against the cell’s back wall.
The biker pushed himself back in a corner and Derek rushed to Milla and hugged her. The jarring cries of the dead were intolerable and they practically had to shout to hear one another. “What the hell are you doing here, baby! Goddamnit, you shouldn’t have come!”
“You’re welcome,” Milla answered.
The cellblock corridor was filled to capacity with the stenches, at least a hundred crammed in, all of them reaching through the bars of the cells to get at the warm flesh goodies inside. They wanted the three of them so desperately their infected fingers were snapping as fast as their hungry jaws.
“Now what?” Derek asked.
“Gimme a minute,” Milla answered as she tried to catch her breath.
The old biker was scared and pissed off, “You brought them here. We would’ve been safe if it wasn’t for you, you dumb bitch!” he shouted.
“Yeah, safe and locked up with no food or water, ya old fucker. Shut the fuck up!” Milla told him.
The biker stepped toward them and pointed at her, “Fuck you!”
“Back off, man, or I’ll fuck your grandpa ass up!” Derek shouted.
“We’re gonna die and it’s your bitch’s fault!” the biker said and stepped closer.
Derek swung at him. The biker avoided it and hit Derek in the face. He fell back and the biker tried to hit him again, but Milla cut him off and elbowed him in the nose, breaking it. The biker’s blood squirted out and he stumbled back from the blow—right within the reach of the dead at the bars—one grabbed onto the biker’s hair and pulled him back, and the rest got him.
“Help me!” he pleaded.
But they couldn’t. His body slammed against the bars and the corpses had at him.
One reached around and took hold of his beard and lower lip, pulling until the skin tore free from his chin and split down his neck. Blood sprayed everywhere, splattering all over Milla and Derek’s feet. The dead that couldn’t reach his body strained their tongues to lap up his blood. Nineteen rotting arms dug into him and he came apart like paper as they tore through one of his legs and yanked it through the bars. They got both his arms, then the other leg—only his head and torso remained as he bled out screaming through his blood-filled mouth. They ripped off his head and pulled on the torso until his ribs split open. Dead hands punched inside him and one came out with his still-beating heart. They fought each other for possession of the morsel.
“Oh fuck! Fuck! Fucking shit!” Derek said in disgust as they watched the biker being slaughtered.
At the cell across from them, the bars came loose from their concrete anchors in the walls and floor; the entire cell front buckled and fell in. The dead got in and killed all four occupants in a splatter of red chunks.
“We need to get out of here!” Milla said.
“Sure, okay!” Derek said in sarcastic fright.
The cell had one window; it was small and heavily barred. They weren’t going to get out through there. Milla examined the bars and the frame closely. She could see her car out in the parking lot, but it might as well be on Mars.
“Baby, we’re not gonna get through that window,” Derek said.
No reply as she continued to study it.
The barred wall of their cell began to give way from the pressure of the dead and Derek could see the concrete fracturing. He knew these were their last moments together. “Milla, while we still have time, I want you to know that—”
—She pulled two hand grenades out of her jacket and Derek looked at them as if they were water in an endless desert. His desperation turned to elation.
“—That I love you,” he said calmly.
“I know,” Milla said tenderly.
Two of the wall bars snapped at the concrete floor from the pressure.
“We gotta go, baby!” Derek said.
With some wire from her pocket, Milla tied one grenade to the bars at the top of the window and then she tied the other at the bottom. She grabbed the pin of the bottom grenade and Derek grabbed the pin of the bottom one.
“On three,” she said.
One top corner of the barred wall broke free and the stenches began to bend it inward…
“One…” Derek started.
“Two…” Milla continued.
“Three!” they said together.
They pulled the grenade pins simultaneously and the safety levers—the
‘spoons’
—were spring-ejected from the grenades, activating the detonation sequence. Derek kissed Milla tightly as the spoons spun by their heads. They both dropped to the floor and rolled under one of the steel slabs that served as beds, covered their ears and——two seconds later…
KA-KA-BOOM!
The concussions shattered concrete and a thick cloud engulfed the cell after the blast destroyed many of the dead at the bars. Milla and Derek got up and saw that the window was blown away, except for one bar near the middle of the window. It was bent crooked and only seated in the bottom of the windowsill, its top sheared off.
“Go! Go! Go!” Derek shouted.
Milla climbed through the window. Derek went next, but he was bigger and couldn’t fit through with the one bar in the way. He took it in both hands and yanked back and forth, Milla helping as she kicked at it from the outside.
The corpses gathered themselves and began to break their way into the cell again. It was only seconds until they would get at Derek. One teenage girl corpse squeezed its way into the cell and charged at him, but he managed to break the lone bar free. He used it to bash through the thing’s face and out the back of its head.
“Come on!” Milla shouted and held her hand to him through the window.
Taking her hand, Derek climbed out and then the dead pushed completely through the bars. They filled the cell and a dozen putrid arms shot out of the window after Derek, missing him by inches.
“Motherfuckers!” Derek shouted as he kicked himself away.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Milla said and they sprinted for her car.
They jumped in and Milla started the engine. She jammed in into reverse and burned rubber. The car jerked backwards and abruptly stopped. She didn’t put it in drive to head to the exit gate; she sat tensely and stared at something.
“Drive, baby, drive! What? What is it?” Derek said.
He saw the problem—
The gate she had come through, which she luckily closed, was crowded with the dead. They saw her and Derek in the car and wanted in as they rattled the gate.
“Fuck,” Derek mouthed.
The gate failed, collapsing as hundreds stormed in and headed straight for them.
“Fuck! Oh fucking hell!” Derek shouted.
Milla was calm, too calm. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw the back wall of the parking lot. It was cinder block and Milla knew they were hollow blocks. She fastened her seat belt, put the car in drive, and then slammed her foot on the gas pedal. The car roared forward at the oncoming stenches.
“Put your seatbelt on!” she said.
“Milla? What the fuck’re you doing?”
She didn’t answer and he clicked on his belt.
The dead were a hundred feet away and the gap was disappearing fast.
“Milla!”
She jerked the steering wheel and the emergency parking brake at the same time and the car skidded into a fishtail, hitting the dead with the back of the car. She straightened the wheel, released the brake, and hit the gas. The car raced toward the back cinder block wall. Derek realized her intent. “Oh! Holy shit!”
The car collided into the wall, cinder blocks exploding as the car burst through. The front windshield was fractured, but Milla was still able to see through it. She jerked the wheel when she saw the alley wall that they were about to crash into. After skidding sideways, the car straightened out and raced down the alley in a cement dust cloud. A moment later, the dead flooded the alley after them.
“Damn, baby!” Derek shouted in joy. “That was some James Bond shit! Hell yeah!”
“We’re not in the clear yet.”
“Whad’ya mean?”
“The whole town is infested with them.”
“All of San Diego?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus Christ.”
They exited the alley onto the street and Milla turned right to head south. Derek saw the conditions on the street—a thick, mottled coat of devastated paint, colored gray from fire ash, brown from old bloodstains, and the deep, brownish crimson of fresh blood splatters covered everything. Including all the property damage and dead bodies that were all over and some of them weren’t dead, there were corpses with missing legs and arms, but yet, they moved. There were multitudes of uninfected people running for their lives. Derek couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing.
“Those bible thumpers were right, this is the end of days.”
“Maybe,” Milla said. “But we’re not dying today.”
She zigzagged left and right to avoid obstacles, people, the undead, wrecked cars, buses, bodies, and whatever else the apocalypse left in the streets. She saw the intersection up ahead and it was filled with the dead so she swung the SUV right and regretted the decision immediately—
That street was also filled with the dead, not as many as the street she turned away from, but it was more than enough to scare her.
“Oh God.” she said.
“Don’t stop, baby, floor it!”
Floor it she did. She had no choice but to mash the gas pedal and hold the steering wheel straight. The damaged SUV increased speed and a second later—it hit the first of them and plowed through. Some of the people she hit looked normal, but she couldn’t tell or risk turning to avoid them because at this speed she could easily lose control and flip the car. She screamed as she held the wheel tightly with both hands. Dozens of bodies slammed into the car in a series of hard splats and thuds, covering the windshield in blood rain, and the windshield cracked more as heads broke against it. She turned on the windshield wipers and the cleaning liquid to clear her view, but it barely helped as the impacts continued. They got confirmation that some of the bodies they hit and drove over were human because they heard some of them—
“—Motherfuckers!—”
“—Die, you—”
“—God, help me!—”
“—Stop!—”
“—God, oh God!—”
The voices roared and then trailed out quickly as they sped by. They made it through the thick of it and came out in another intersection. Milla turned left and this street wasn’t as bad, but she still had to turn a lot to avoid colliding with various things. The wiper cleaning liquid ran out, but it was just enough to clean the fractured glass from a bloody splintered-blurry view, to a splintered-blurry view, she could see ahead of her now.
“There has to be a way outta this shit!”
“I’m trying,” Milla answered.
They went through a maze of destruction for another few blocks before they came upon a large horde at the intersection ahead of them.
“Goddamnit!” Derek gasped.
Milla turned away from them and most of the horde ran after the car, but they couldn’t keep up with it. She easily left them in her dust. At the next intersection, it was much worse; they saw another huge horde or the tail end of the same horde, blocking the entire intersection.
“Oh no! Fuck!” Milla cried.
They headed right for hundreds of them and she only had seconds to react—
She yanked the wheel and the parking brake, the SUV burned rubber sideways and spun right into the mob, sending many of them into the air on impact. Derek’s seatbelt didn’t catch right away and he instinctively put his hands up to stop himself, one hand hit the radio and turned it on—Karen Carpenter’s sweet voice filled the car:
“Rainy days and Mondays always get me down
…
”
Milla hit the gas, but the car wouldn’t go, the tires burned in place—