The blast reached the truck less than a second later, rocking it forward, the back wheels hoisted off the ground. Ryan gripped the wheel tightly as the paint on the outside of the truck peeled and evaporated, the plastic taillights melted into red jelly. The glass in the side mirror exploded. The ice cream cone bobbing atop the truck’s roof disintegrated.
We’ll be lucky if we aren’t baked like turkeys in an oven,
Ryan thought, grappling with the wheel.
Ryan managed to regain control of the truck, glancing in what remained of the rearview mirror and only seeing a cloud of black smoke and orange flames. He drove farther down the road, not stopping until they had reached a safe distance. He unbuckled his seatbelt and climbed into the back of the truck.
Becky was bent over Fred, who was on his back with his eyes closed, but still conscious. The crossbow sat on his stomach. Ryan touched the handle on the back door, tentatively at first, to see if it was hot. He opened it and they had a majestic view of the fiery inferno that was the refinery. Flames had engulfed it, the smoke so black and so thick that it blotted out the sky.
“I think we got them all,” Ryan said in disbelief. He patted Fred on the leg. “How you doing, buddy?”
“I’m alive…for now. And I’m too fuckin’ tired to give you the ‘shoot me in the head if I turn into one of them’ speech.”
“Goes without saying.”
“I don’t get it,” Becky said. “How did you do it?”
Fred laughed hoarsely. He dug his hand into the quiver and brought out another bolt. He lifted it so Ryan and Becky could see the tip and said, “
Exploding tips
.”
Then, standing in the gusting snow, the fire raging behind them, they laughed. And they kept on laughing because they didn’t have anything better to do.
An hour had passed. During that time, more stragglers had crawled out of the night, sometimes in groups of threes, sometimes in pairs, but most often by themselves, moving like stranded tourists that had missed their boat. A funny thought had occurred to Kevin:
they’re just like us, the way we were in high school. They’re the ones nobody else wants to hang out with…the nerds.
The thought had gotten him chuckling to himself, and when Rhonda asked him what was so funny, he simply shook his head and said, “Never mind. Inside joke.” Up until now, he hadn’t considered himself an overtly judgmental person, but here he was already creating social statuses for zombies. The same way he had been so keenly aware of the social structure in high school; the same way he had created categories for his customers, classified them, and then judged the individual based on a broader group behavior.
“Think we got them all?” Derek asked. “We haven’t seen any for a while.”
“Maybe,” Kevin said.
Rhonda said, “How long do we wait?”
“I don’t know. As long as it takes, I guess.”
But Kevin had already done the math in his head. He had calculated the time it would take to reach the refinery, had factored for any delays, had thrown in a small cushion to account for any unexpected obstacles. It all added up the same: it should have happened by now. He was beginning to fear the worst, but all they could do was stand there and wait because the only alternative was…
“How will we know if they pulled it off?” Derek said.
“Trust me, we’ll kn –”
An explosion rocked the night. In the distance, flames had already started to rise into the sky like the angry orange fingers of a giant, black smoke coiling upward, staining the hazy winter gloom.
“That’s how,” Kevin said.
“Woo-fuckin’-hoo!” Derek shouted. “They did it!”
“We actually did it,” Rhonda said. “We saved the town.”
“Think they’ll give us medals?” Derek asked.
“Screw a medal,” Kevin said. “I was thinking more along the lines of a cash reward.”
“What we
need
to do is skip town,” Rhonda said. “I think I’ve had about all of Trudy that I can take.”
“
We?
”
“Well, you know, I was just…it’s a little premature, but…I was thinking…
if
you’re not still hung up on your ex…”
“You don’t have to worry about that. She’s dead to me.” Kevin scooped Rhonda up and hugged her tightly, her feet leaving the ground. “A move would be good. Sioux City is only forty-five minutes away.”
Rhonda stared at him.
“I was kidding,” Kevin said.
Rhonda smiled and said, “I was thinking somewhere farther away. L.A. maybe.”
“I’ll follow you anywhere.” His face grew serious for a moment. “Wait, you don’t have a long lost soul mate there do you?”
“Now that you mention it…”
“Shut it.”
Kevin kissed her then, and would have gone on kissing her, but suddenly the ground beneath their feet began to tremble. At first, he thought it had something to do with kissing Rhonda; that his body had become a rocket and was preparing for lift-off, or some other physical manifestation of a clichéd expression like when people talked about getting angry and seeing red, or fell in love and said there were sparks between them. Or maybe it was what that band Katrina and the Waves sang about in the song
Walking on Sunshine
.
But then Derek said, “Did you feel that?”
The tremor grew in intensity. They could see the cars that were parked along the street shaking.
“Maybe it’s an aftershock? Because of the refinery.”
“You’re thinking of an earthquake.”
A seam appeared in the street, winding toward them as the concrete split open like the fragile shell of an egg. A fire hydrant on the corner across the street torpedoed into the sky and a geyser of water spewed forth, quickly flooding the sidewalk. Trees were uprooted from the ground in little explosions of dirt, toppling over onto cars, houses, and whatever else happened to be in their path.
At the intersection directly before Main Street and the convention center, the asphalt heaved upward as though the Earth itself was exhaling, and then the chunks succumbed to gravity, pulled downward into a fathomless pit, forming a sinkhole that was at least thirty feet wide.
A single thick tentacle slithered out of the sinkhole and slapped against the street. Another appeared, and then another, until there were too many to count, some as thick as the toppled trees. A mass rose from the center of the sinkhole. A flesh-colored pillar that looked like it had been fashioned using human skin and melted candle wax.
“Watch out!” Kevin yelled as a quivering tentacle as wide as an economy car rose from the ground and then came smashing down onto the spot where Kevin had been standing only a moment before. The sidewalk rippled. Kevin picked himself up from the ground and grabbed his shotgun.
“What the hell is it?” Derek said, diving for cover behind an overturned car.
It’s got a human head,
Kevin thought as his mind sought an explanation.
That’s a man’s face! Crazy-looking as all fuck, but that thing was a person once.
Kevin brought up the shotgun and fired, blasting the creature at the base where the tentacles flopped up and down anxiously. The bullet struck home, and white pus oozed from the wound. The creature screamed, but it wasn’t really a scream, it was an alien screech that made Kevin want to clap his hands over his ears and curl up into a fetal position.
Another tentacle jumped into the air, stretched taut, and then whipped down toward Rhonda. Kevin tackled her and they narrowly avoided being crushed.
Derek popped up from behind the car. He fired the rifle, tearing another hole in the creature’s flesh. Pus oozed, but the shot didn’t have a discernible effect on the quivering mass of jelly. The creature seemed to be one giant gelatinous sac of white pus. It reminded Derek of a semi-transparent sausage casing, but instead of being stuffed with meat, it was filled to bursting with the chalk-colored goo.
Kevin pulled Rhonda to her feet, yanking her after him as he made a dash for the car Derek was hiding behind.
“Now we’re fighting aliens?” Derek said, firing another shot before he crouched down again.
I don’t think it’s an alien, or at least it didn’t start out that way,
Kevin thought. His panicking mind tried to reach back into some far back compartment, searching for a shred of memory. Something one of the others had said when the entire fiasco had started; there was an answer, but he couldn’t quite grasp hold of it.
Rhonda wore a grimace of pain. She had rolled up the left leg of her jogging pants high enough to expose her ankle. It was swollen and discolored. She glanced up and caught Kevin’s worried gaze. “I don’t think it’s broken,” she said. “I came down on it wrong when you tackled me.”
“I usually hold off on the physical abuse until later in the relationship,” Kevin said.
“Very funny,” Rhonda said, doing her best to smile through the pain.
Derek had his back against the cold metal of the car’s driver’s side door, staring at Kevin with a flabbergasted look that seemed to say,
Are you really fucking joking right now?
Kevin caught him staring. “Are you okay?”
Derek nodded, his mouth hanging open as if frozen in a permanent state of shock and surprise. “Our guns won’t hurt it. We need a bazooka or something.”
Glass exploded, raining down on their heads as a tentacle smashed down on the car they were hiding behind. A thick tentacle slithered across the ground like an eyeless snake and wrapped itself around Kevin’s leg, yanking him out from behind the car. His face smashed against the pavement; he felt the warm rush of blood gush from his nose. He clawed at the asphalt as he slid backward on his stomach, the tentacle pulling him toward the quaking pillar of flesh with the once-human face.
As he was being dragged backward, Kevin caught the metal pole of a street sign and clung to it for dear life, thinking it was a matter of holding tight and perhaps being torn in half, or letting go and being sucked up into the thirty foot blob of some distant planet’s version of Silly Putty.
“A little help here for Christ’s sake!” Kevin yelled.
The tentacle wrapped itself around his lower leg more tightly. Then came the sickening sound of a branch being crushed under a boot as his tibia snapped in two. Kevin screamed. His head swam with fuzzy black dots like Rorschach inkblots being held too close to his eyes.
Derek leaped forward, bringing out a gleaming Bowie knife. He brought the knife down and stabbed it into the tentacle, severing it. The creature let out an eardrum-shattering howl of pain and retracted its severed tentacle, spewing pus like an out-of-control fire hose.
“Take that,
bitch!
” Derek yelled, relishing the small victory, which turned out to be short-lived as a tentacle shot forward and struck him in the chest. He was slammed against a car and slid to the ground, unconscious.
Kevin crawled over to Rhonda, dragging his broken leg behind him, a toddler step away from losing consciousness. “We’re goners.”
“We can’t be,” Rhonda said in defiance, squeezing the trigger of her Beretta over and over again until it made nothing more than a dry click. She sank down beside Kevin, letting the gun fall from her hand. “I don’t understand. We were
so
close.”
“Life’s a bitch,” Kevin said. “And then you find out you can’t even escape it after you’re dead.”
“This is serious!” Rhonda said, but it was a feeble argument.
Kevin felt himself fading, starting to clock out, lights going dim, and he discovered he was too tired to fight it. It was easier to let the cozy warmth wrap around him like a thick blanket. Who cared if he wasn’t awake for the grand finale? God willing, he would sleep right on through being eaten alive or absorbed or whatever fucked up shit the creature had in store for them.
I know!
his mind insisted.
It looks like a giant penis! A cock with a face!
He let out a half-hearted chuckle, resting his head in Rhonda’s lap as his eyes grew heavy.
And then he heard the music. Was it the sound of angel’s singing? Beckoning him to the afterlife perhaps?
If that’s angels,
Kevin thought as he began to slip off,
then they can’t sing worth a shit.