Where had they gone? And why had only he been left behind?
“Why me?”
He hadn’t intended to speak out loud. It had just happened, the words popping out before the thought had even registered. He regretted the utterance immediately. The sound resonated disturbingly in the empty space, echoing and bouncing back at him, making him cringe as if he had screamed the words instead of uttering them in his normal speaking voice.
Run,
he thought.
No more thinking. Just run.
NOW.
And so he did, spinning away from the screen to race to the top of the aisle and the double doors there. He seized one of the door handles, intending fully to yank it open and just keep running. But yet another disturbing thought flashed through his mind before he could do that.
The theater workers.
He had forgotten about them, but now he was remembering. Oh yes. All of them so strangely identical. So weird-looking. There had been something off about them. The one part of the illusion that hadn’t been perfect, perhaps? He thought so. More than that. He
knew
it. He didn’t know who or what those guys were, but they were not human.
And they might still be lurking out there in the lobby of this strange pseudotheater.
Shit.
He pressed his face up close to the door’s vertical window and peered out at the lobby. At first he thought there was nothing out there, just a formless white void, but then he began to make out shapes.
A short hallway led to the space that had functioned as the theater’s lobby. However, like this auditorium, it had been stripped of its illusory skin. From his vantage point, he could see a corner of what had been the concessions stand. A translucent panel hung on the wall behind it. Once it had displayed the prices of refreshments, but now it was a blank slate. His eyes flicked to the hallway floor and he saw another series of translucent panels, where another pulse of diffused light repeatedly made the circuit from one end of the hallway to the other and back again.
That impression of being aboard some unfathomably advanced starship returned, this time seeming a
likely explanation for what he was seeing, rather than some fanciful notion based on movies. Which would mean the theater workers were imperfectly disguised members of an alien race. Some kind of weird research team that had come to earth to perform behavioral experiments on unsuspecting humans.
He thought he was really on to something there, but he couldn’t see what use the insight was to him. He wasn’t a hero in a movie. It wasn’t up to him to save the day or anything like that. He was just a regular guy with an unfortunate fixation on a girl who had hurt him, a stupid thing that had caused him to become caught up in a situation he couldn’t possibly solve. He couldn’t help any of the people who had disappeared from this place. Not even Lashon.
No one was moving around out there. It was time to stop cowering behind this fucking door and make a run for it.
Before he wound up trapped here forever.
Or killed.
He sucked in a big breath, slowly released it.
And then he pulled the door open.
Chapter Ten
They were coming closer.
The zombies.
Drawn from the shadows by the smell of fresh meat, appearing singly and in groups of two or three or more. A few looked fresh, as if they had just turned. But most more closely resembled the one Jason had put down. Their clothes were dirty and ragged. Their flesh bore evidence of old wounds, a few of which were especially hideous. Ripped-open stomach cavities and ruined faces.
One lumbering figure approaching from Brix’s left wore the uniform of a policeman. He was missing an arm. A fragment of bone protruded from the stump. But Brix’s gaze went to the empty holster attached to the belt around his narrow waist. She assumed the man had lost his sidearm during his own struggle for life. Which was too bad for him, but it reminded her of something important.
Like really,
really
fucking important.
The Glock in the glove compartment of the F-150.
Panic jolted her as a horrible thought flashed through her mind. This was a different version of reality from the one she had inhabited until a few moments ago. Did the big truck her father had passed down to her even exist in this world?
Shit.
She got a quick fix on her relative location in the parking lot and turned in the direction that should point her toward the truck—assuming it was even there.
There it is!
Her truck was parked right where she had left it, over by Jason’s shitty old Chevy Malibu, a couple dozen yards from where she stood now. She took off running, propelled forward by instinct, paying no mind to the startled voices calling after her.
They were surrounded by zombies. Enemies. Creatures intent on killing and devouring them. They needed some form of protection. More than that, a means of fighting back. She would feel better—more in control—with the reassuring weight of the Glock in her hands.
None of this was anything she consciously thought. They were things she understood on a gut level. The enemy had the greater numbers. The enemy would be relentless and unafraid. Her Glock 17’s magazine contained 17 bullets. Not nearly enough to permanently beat back an enemy as vast as the one they likely faced, but it was better than nothing. It was a start. A fucking fighting chance.
But something was wrong. She saw that too clearly as she drew closer to the hulking outline of the old F-150. She stopped short, her heart sinking as she saw that its windows had been blown out. But that was hardly the extent of the damage. Black scorch marks marred the truck’s exterior. The tires had melted.
But the moment of despair was short-lived. There was no time to wallow in it. She shoved away the reflexive self-pity. A deep-seated anger took root in its place. Someone had violated her property, an act constituting an assault against her personally. Something like that could not go unpunished. She couldn’t hit back against the specific individuals who had trashed her truck, but she had another target in mind—the mysterious creatures who had caused this reality split or whatever the hell it actually was.
They
were the ultimate responsible party here, and
they
would pay.
Somehow.
She heard feet pounding across the asphalt behind her. More panicked shouts. Brix ignored this and got moving once again. Seconds later she reached the truck.
The door on the passenger side was cool to the touch. She seized the handle and gave it a yank. Locked. Of course. She never left it otherwise. Her purse was back in the theater in that other reality, so she didn’t have her keys. But given the condition of the truck, that wasn’t really a problem.
She slithered in through the open window, a pile of safety glass on the floorboard crunching beneath her booted feet as she situated herself in front of the glove compartment.
Just one problem.
The fire had melted the truck’s entire dash, including the glove compartment’s door. The melted plastic had congealed around its edges. She gripped the mangled handle and pulled on it with all her might, but it wouldn’t budge.
She thumped a fist against the ruined dash.
“Shit!”
“What the fuck are you doing in there?”
Jason Tatum, his voice right next to her.
Brix glanced out the window and saw him standing next to the truck. His eyes were wide and his chest was going up and down, a result of chasing her across the lot. He looked scared. She couldn’t blame him. He was still holding the tire iron. It was the old kind, a long, rust-flecked piece of metal with a socket for turning lug nuts and a pronged end for popping off hubcaps.
Brix leaned through the window and snatched it from his hands.
His face contorted in a mix of surprise and fury. “Hey! Give that back!”
“Sorry. I need it.”
She poked at the edges of the glove compartment’s door with the pronged end of the tire iron, feeling for an open space where she could insert the metal. She finally found an opening in the melted plastic, albeit a very small one, and then gritted her teeth as she tightened her grip on the tire iron. Calling upon every ounce of strength she possessed, she drove the thing deeper into that tiny hole. The hole widened and she began cranking the tool up and down.
There was a cracking sound as some of the melted plastic began to give way. Still, the marginally wider opening wasn’t nearly big enough. She had to keep working at it. So she tightened her grip again and redoubled the effort, nearly screaming through her gritted teeth at the strain it was causing in her arms and shoulders.
Jason had fallen silent. She could feel him watching her, probably wondering what on earth could possibly be worth this kind of effort, especially in the midst of this much danger.
“My gun.”
“Say again?”
At least he sounded somewhat calmer now.
“My gun. My Glock. It’s in the goddamn glove box.”
“Oh.”
“We need it.”
A pause, followed by a sigh. “Right. Okay. I get that. Really. But if you can’t get to it in the next few seconds…”
He let the rest of it hang there.
Brix didn’t need to hear the words. She knew well enough what the stakes were. Either she would get this damn thing open and get to the gun
right now
, or it was time to accept defeat and get out of here and get running again.
She shifted her position on the barren seat bench, folded one leg beneath her for greater leverage, and screamed as she again cranked the tire iron up and down. The cracking sound was louder this time and an instant later the pronged end of the tool slipped all the way into the compartment.
Brix shifted her body around again, pressing the sole of a boot against the tire iron while she gripped the socket end with both hands. She shoved downward ferociously and was rewarded with the loudest crackling of yielding plastic yet. The compartment door dropped open and there was the Glock. She nearly cried at the sight of that lovely shiny-nickel plating.
She heard the others now.
Trevor yelling at her.
That Nikki idiot gibbering in terror.
She tossed the tire iron through the open window and heard Jason Tatum gasp in surprise. The tool clattered on asphalt. Jason cursed. No matter. Everything was cool now. Well, relatively speaking.
Brix grabbed her gun and slithered back out through the window, dropping to the ground a moment later and turning to face the terror-stricken faces of the others. Strike that. Trevor and Nikki were terror-stricken. Jason was scared, too, but he also looked composed and ready to fight. Good. She thought she could count on him when things turned tough. Which would be any fucking second now. It grieved her to think it, but she couldn’t say the same for Trevor. His safety would have to be damn near her top priority from here on out, because otherwise he wouldn’t survive.
There were even more zombies now.
Dozens of them.
The closest was maybe ten feet away, closing on an oblivious Trevor from behind. Brix brushed past him, took aim at the zombie’s head and squeezed off a single shot. A single shot was all she needed. Her aim was perfect, as always. A hole punched through the center of the thing’s forehead and an explosion of bone and brains blew out the back of its skull.
That’s one down.
She listened to the groans of the shuffling, rotting animated corpses.
And a hundred to go.
But she amended the thought in the next second. The threat they were facing wasn’t limited to what they could see here. There were likely thousands more of these dead things out there. Maybe millions of them. Perhaps even
hundreds
of millions. All over the world. At least, if what they were dealing with here was a global apocalypse, a
Dawn of the Dead
scenario. And she thought it was.
The sheer scope of it felt suddenly oppressive. Suffocating. Her breathing quickened at the thought of it. But she couldn’t afford to lose control. Not now. Things seemed hopeless. But that didn’t mean she could just give up.
Still, the enemy’s strength in numbers was a real issue. The Glock’s clip held sixteen bullets now. She could use them all and be bang on target every time and it still wouldn’t be nearly enough. They had to retreat. Find shelter, some place where they could regroup and figure out a survival plan.
She turned away from the line of approaching dead and looked at Jason. “Your car looks like it hasn’t been fucked with. Get us the fuck out of here.”
He dragged a set of keys out of a hip pocket. “Shit. Let’s give it a shot. But it’s a tricky fucker sometimes. I get stranded a lot.”
The 1970-something Malibu was parked near the F-150. Miraculously, it appeared to have escaped whatever calamity had befallen her truck and some of the other nearby vehicles.