Jason shifted his grip from the handle to the barrel and whipped it across the face of the next zombie that came within range. That knocked the thing over but its flailing earned him a jagged scratch down the underside of his arm.
Brix wanted to scream at him. He was being stupid and careless, so much the opposite of how he had behaved at the outset of this madness. And now that it was just the two of them, she needed him more than ever to keep his head in the game. As she watched in helpless anger and frustration, he took another swipe at the next zombie in his path with the butt of the gun’s handle rather than veering around it. This time the gun bounced off the top of the thing’s skull and went flying out of Jason’s hand. He earned more scratches for his trouble, this time three livid red marks across a cheek.
Shit.
Fucking idiot.
She saw that he had something jammed into a back pocket. It was hard to tell on the run like this, but it sort of looked like a screwdriver. He’d have better luck using that thing as a weapon than the empty revolver. A quick jab to the temple with the screwdriver and it’d be lights out for any of these living dead motherfuckers. But the jackass had clearly stopped thinking straight the instant they’d come flying out of the house.
The zombie he’d wounded with one of his last bullets was struggling to its feet again. Brix would take care of it with a calmly placed round to the center of the forehead. She stayed on the move as she aimed and fired. Anything else would mean death. There were just too many of the things around now. They’d had time to amass in numbers while Brix and Jason had been holed up in that fucking death trap of a house. And now, spilling out of the spaces between the houses to her right, was a great shambling horde of rotting, upright corpses.
Three of the faster ones were converging on her from that direction.
She swung her arm out, took quick, careful aim.
Click.
BOOM.
Click.
BOOM.
Click…
Shit, goddammit!
The one clip she’d had was finally empty and suddenly she was a lot more scared. With a loaded gun in her hand, she felt capable of taking on and vanquishing any adversary. Now that her weapon was useless, she was all too aware of how vulnerable she truly was. She turned on the speed instead and soon closed the gap between herself and Jason. But then, as they neared a street corner, he abruptly veered diagonally across an overgrown, trash-strewn yard. She saw him skid to a stop next to an ugly beige-yellow compact car.
She screamed at him, “The fuck are you going!?”
For an answer, he peeled off his Slayer shirt and wound it around a fist, which he then slammed repeatedly at the
driver’s side window. The glass began to splinter and give way. Then his fist punched through and glass clinked as it tumbled to the seat. He kept the shirt wound around his hand and knocked away more glass fragments before reaching inside to grab the door handle and spring the lock.
He peeled the shirt off his hand and tossed it into the car.
Against her better judgment, Brix risked a backward glance.
Oh, fucking hell…
There were even more of them now. A virtual sea of rotting flesh advancing on them like a column of drunken soldiers stumbling across a battlefield.
Brix looked at Jason. “Mind explaining yourself? And make it fast, because we’re about to be fucking dead, man.”
Jason pulled the screwdriver from his rear pocket, smiled grimly at her, and dropped into the car behind the steering wheel. “This is a trick my dad taught me. Sometimes works with older cars like this ugly-ass piece of shit.”
Her brow furrowed with doubt as she watched him fit the slotted screwdriver in the car’s ignition. He worked it in as far as he could and then began cranking the thing back and forth. The first few times only yielded dispiriting dead clicks. She was sure it wouldn’t work. No way could it work. Their luck was too bad for that—
The engine sputtered to life.
Jason let out a
whoop
of triumph, which was promptly drowned out by the loud rock and roll rattling the car’s tinny speakers. It was a song she recognized instantly because it was one of her favorites—Wednesday 13’s “I Walked with a Zombie”.
Even with imminent, teeth-gnashing death bearing down on them at any moment, this was just too much.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
A zombie song? Seriously? What were the fucking odds? And wasn’t this just how it’d be in some low-budget cinematic, walking-dead extravaganza?
Of course it was.
So it made a fucked-up, twisted kind of bizarro sense.
Jason pulled the door shut and leaned over to unlock the door on the other side.
Brix didn’t need further prompting.
The front line of zombies was more than halfway across the litter-covered yard at the corner. She hurried to the other side of the car, yanked the door open, and got in just as Jason was putting it in gear.
A zombie fell across the hood and reached for them with a gnarled, clawing hand. In the same second Jason stomped on the gas pedal and sent them flying backward. The zombie’s twisted brown fingers grasped one of the windshield wipers and it was able to hang on for a long moment.
The wiper blade peeled away from the windshield and the zombie slid a few inches down the hood, until Jason stomped down on the brake pedal, bringing the car to a wild, fishtailing stop in the middle of the street. The tagalong zombie slalomed sideways across the hood in a violent motion. The wiper blade broke off in its hand as the creature tumbled to the street and rolled a few times before hitting the curb.
Brix’s gaze remained riveted to the road ahead. The desperate backward flight had put some distance between themselves and the still-advancing zombie horde. The nearest zombies were some twenty yards away. But they were closing fast. Faster than she could ever have imagined. She stared at their dead eyes and their reaching, grasping fingers and the thing she sensed most strongly was desperation. A terrible, gnawing hunger that could simply never be sated. It was consuming them, driving their decaying bodies ever forward in search of warm food, even as rotting pieces of themselves gave way and dropped to the street.
Closer.
Fifteen yards.
That terrible groaning, louder all the time.
Jason hit the gas again and cranked the wheel hard to the right, causing the car’s rear tires to bounce over the curb. Brix let out a cry of surprise as her head bumped the ceiling. Then Jason was shifting gears and cranking the wheel hard in the other direction. He gave it another burst of gas and the car bounced back over the curb with an alarming scrape of metal. He leaned over the wheel and kept the pedal to the floor with a grim, determined look on his face. They flew through a four-way stop without slowing down and kept on going.
Brix twisted in her seat and saw the zombies receding in the distance.
She heaved a sigh of immense relief and turned back around, reaching for the stereo’s volume control to squelch the blaring rock music.
Jason looked at her, a wild grin that was equal parts relief and lingering terror stretching across his face. “Shit. Shit! Holy shit!” He smacked the steering wheel with a fist. “I can’t believe we got out of there.”
Brix couldn’t believe it either. They’d had some other close calls, but none quite so narrow as this latest. And yet there was no time to waste in exulting.
“We have to get out of this town.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“It’s like I said. We have to get out to the country, out to the wide open spaces.”
Jason took a right turn at another four-way stop. Then the engine roared again and they shot down to the end of the next street, pausing only briefly at yet another four-way stop. As they rolled through to the other side, Brix saw a lone zombie standing in the middle of a yard in front of a little house missing its front door. A chain-link fence ringed the yard. The zombie started toward them, its hands stretched outward in the standard I-am-seriously-fucking-hungry-right-now living dead way.
Brix turned her head and tracked his progress as long as she could, somehow unaccountably mesmerized by the lone creature. She thought maybe it was because the zombies seemed more pathetic observed individually, rather than as part of some overwhelming, mindless force. And more sad, too. The zombie hit the chain-link fence and stopped in its tracks, unable to go any farther. Its head turned in their direction and it stared dumbly after them.
Brix faced the front again. “Poor fucking things.”
She expected reflexive anger from Jason. But instead he nodded and said, “Yeah. It’s fucked up.”
They rolled up to another stop sign. This time it was a three-way stop. They could go left or right. Brix had a vague idea where they were now. A left would take them deeper into the old part of town. A right would eventually take them out toward the university.
Jason cranked the wheel to the right and went that way.
He looked at her. “Quicker way to the interstate.”
Brix grunted. “Suits me.”
They rode on in relative silence for a time. Another mile or so up the street and they began to reach the outskirts of campus. The streets were crowded on each side with beer and tobacco stores, bars, and restaurants. There weren’t too many zombies visible, but Brix did spot several lone ones staggering around in the streets and on the sidewalks. They hardly constituted a horde, but then again, she’d thought the same thing earlier, during their flight from the accident scene. And somehow a horde had eventually formed anyway. There were enough of them around to warrant concern, at least.
She looked at Jason. “How much farther to the—”
There was a loud
BANG!
, and the steering wheel went spinning out of Jason’s hands as the car fishtailed across lanes of dead traffic, clipping the fender of an ancient Buick en route to the opposite side of the street. Brix screeched in fright as the car bounced up over a curb and careened into the parking lot of a convenience store. The car crashed to a halt as it collided with a gas pump, resulting in a rending screech of shredded metal.
Brix lurched forward then rocked backward into her seat.
She glanced in numb shock at Jason. “The fuck happened?”
He looked stunned, too, and could only shake his head. “Dunno. Blew out a tire, I guess. We’re just lucky—”
There was another loud, cracking sound.
Something smashed into the dash between them, destroying the stereo.
They both glanced backward and saw the splintered glass of the rear window. The truth of what was happening hit them simultaneously. There was no time to discuss or debate the obvious. Someone was shooting at them and they were sitting ducks.
Jason threw his door open and scrambled out of the car. Brix quickly followed suit. Jason dashed across the parking lot and climbed over a small, landscaped hill lined with bushes. Again, no time for debate and one direction was as good as another under the circumstances, so Brix followed him up the hill and into the parking lot of the bar next to the convenience store. Yet another shot rang out and sparks flew up from the asphalt near Jason as he raced at high speed toward the bar, which the marquee on the sign above the parking lot told her was called the Boro Bar and Grill. Beneath the establishment’s name, spelled out in changeable block letters:
TONIGHT ONLY! THE LIKES OF US & STALLION
.
Local bands, probably.
She doubted either of them would actually be here tonight.
Show cancelled due to zombie apocalypse.
Three more loud rifle reports in rapid succession drove the thought from her mind.
A slug creased Jason across the right bicep, but he kept going. Brix felt like she was about to come out of her skin as she continued to follow him. Knowing a bullet from the unknown, unseen assailant could take her down any second was unbearable. She felt more helpless and scared and vulnerable than ever. And she knew one thing with absolute clarity—despite everything that had happened, despite the loss of her great love, she wanted to go on living. More than anything, she wanted that.
The front door of the bar came open as Jason reached it.
Actually, an instant before he reached it.
There was no time to ponder this new mystery. And no doubt at all as to the only path available to her now.
She followed Jason through the open door into the Boro Bar and Grill.
And then the door slammed shut.
Chapter Twenty
He wished they would hurry up and kill him. And not just because the things they were doing to him were causing wave upon endless wave of mind-shattering agony. No, the real reason he craved death was because the memories were coming back. Previously they had hidden away in some remote, impenetrable corner of his mind, thanks to an alcoholic blackout. But the intense pain had brought them screaming back to the surface, searing his consciousness with images so vividly lurid in their obscene sickness he would give anything to stop seeing them. Anything, including his life. Maybe even especially that.