Authors: John Hornor Jacobs
It was mid-July; sweat prickled her temples and spotted her shirt. She looked at Robbins, who seemed to be holding up well. She’d have to check his wound once they’d reached somewhere safe.
Martha walked away from Lucy and Robbins.
Lucy stopped. “Martha, where are you—”
“I’ve got family of my own. My little sister. Now that Deb is okay—”
“Martha. Look. We’ll take you. You might need our help.”
The woman holding the bundle swayed and passed her free hand across her forehead. Then she looked at Robbins and frowned. Her expression was clear—she didn’t think he’d do much to improve the situation.
Lucy raised her voice. “Damn it, woman, we’re both doctors. Come with us. It’ll be safer. Everyone’s going crazy! Do you want to be alone?”
As if to punctuate her words, a fusillade of gunfire came from inside the clinic. Then, a rumbling grew and grew until Martha winced and Lucy raised her hands to her ears. A gigantic low-flying plane appeared above the tree line, its massive props buzzing the air in near subsonic frequencies. It passed overhead, frighteningly close—so close Lucy could see the open side door of the plane, the men there with headphones on, and more behind them in shadow, pointing and yelling silently, their voices blanketed by the noise of the props cutting the air. Dull gunmetal glinted in the sunlight and the open mouths of large-bore weapons swiveled, searching for a target.
The massive sound made Lucy stagger; it rattled her skeleton and vibrated her flesh. Robbins moaned. From beyond the clinic, two black specks rose into view and the sound buffeting them took on a rhythmic, percussive pulse. Helicopters, angular and heavy.
Martha looked around wildly.
“Come with us. We’ll help you.”
Martha nodded and shifted the swaddled infant in her arms.
Another DC-10 rumbled across the sky. Beyond it, two jets shrieked through the blue, leaving contrails.
“Holy shit.”
Lucy jerked Robbins forward, nearly knocking him off his feet. “Press the goddamned button, Robby!”
A vehicle chirped. They scrambled across blacktop. At the SUV, Lucy yanked open the back door and shoved Robbins into the seat. Martha hobbled up behind.
“Gimme the keys.” Lucy opened the driver’s door. Robbins dangled the key ring over the seat. She snatched them out of his hand and tossed him her purse. “Get me my phone and then patch yourself up.”
She cranked the ignition, and the Suburban roared to life. Lucy slammed it into gear and peeled away, turning the wheel hard.
The Suburban’s chassis shuddered as a tire hit a curb. Through the roof, Lucy felt the vibration of helicopters passing overhead.
The Suburban barreled around the side of the clinic past the patient parking area, toward the front of the building, passing near a dull green army vehicle—Lucy didn’t know what kind, but it looked armored and sat in front of the smoking front doors of the clinic.
Lucy slowed. Military men and patients milled on the pavement under the awning, some in the mulch beds to either side of it.
She stopped the car.
“Wait just a second, guys.”
She opened the door and it dinged a tinny warning. She ran around the front of the Suburban, toward the clinic’s entryway. The people looked disheveled. Dazed. Bloody.
Her feet crunched on glass. They turned to face her.
Lucy gasped and stepped backward.
One of the soldiers staggered forward, guts spooling out of his stomach and dragging on the ground. A girl, the one who’d bitten off her fingertips and lips, was now missing her pelvis and legs. The child pulled herself over the threshold of the clinic and onto the concrete walkway with raw, stripped fingers. An elderly man’s head tilted over dramatically where a bullet had blown out his neck, exposing sinew and gristle.
A toddler stepped forward, apparently whole except for bite marks on his arms.
Lucy’s stomach lurched. All were dead. Despite reason, despite her training, she knew this with certainty.
These people were dead.
More came from the building, slowly, onto the walkway and into the sunlight. Walking corpses.
Milky white eyes held her in an intense, unfocused gaze.
They came for her, moaning.
She turned and ran to the Suburban. The creatures followed.
A helicopter, wreathed in deafening sound, passed over again and swung its tail about, presenting the clinic with its profile. Lucy glimpsed a man behind a mass of gray metal. Despite the din of rotors, she heard a
brrrrrppp
, like a great
mechanical belch, and the awning and front of the clinic disappeared in a quickly expanding billow of smoke seeded with bits of cloth, spatters of blood, and small chunks of brick and cement.
Lucy threw herself into the SUV. Bullets chewed the walkway. One of the dead vanished in a mist of blood.
She blindly cranked the vehicle into gear and jammed her foot to the accelerator. They shot forward, careened around the median, and sideswiped a poorly parked sedan. The passenger window turned white with a web of cracks.
The wheels screeched as she accelerated onto the highway. The Suburban tilted sideways on the turn, and Lucy feared they would topple. But it rocked back down on its shocks. In front of her, the road was empty and the interstate overpass fast approached. Semis and automobiles whizzed along Highway 65. Some slowed, most likely to gape at the helicopters. She mashed the accelerator to the floor.
A myriad of tiny geysers, puffs of smoke, and asphalt ejecta traced a path toward the Suburban.
“They’re shooting at us!” Robbins’s voice pitched toward hysterical.
Holes appeared in the hood with a sharp
thunk
. Shafts of sunlight, like columns sprouting in a line down the roof, fell into the cabin of the vehicle. Robbins barked a garbled noise of surprise. Lucy looked down at the floorboard and saw, through a smoking half-inch hole, pavement whizzing by underneath in a blur. The engine coughed and began to whine.
Lucy craned her neck to look at Robbins and Martha and the child—the child! Martha clutched her bundle tight to
her chest and peered behind them, out the back window, as smoking bullet craters streaked in a dotted, quick path away from the SUV. The thunder of helicopter rotor blades diminished, and Lucy turned back to the wheel.
The Suburban coughed again and slowed dramatically. Then sputtered. Something in the engine whined even louder, caught, then jerked forward with renewed acceleration. Lucy was at a loss to even begin to know what might be damaged.
She grimaced at the irony: she knew the most intimate functions of the human body, but a combustion engine was a mystery to her. She stomped the accelerator, and the vehicle jumped forward. The beast still had some life yet.
She spied a truck swerving into the oncoming lane. Again, the beat of rotors grew audible. The helicopter completed its turn and began another pass. The oncoming driver plunged his vehicle off the road and into the crusty bare lot adjacent to the interstate, the truck bottoming out with a shower of sparks, bouncing up and then flipping into the air, as graceful as a gymnast, before hitting the ground and smashing into a wretched pretzel of steel and smoke.
The SUV’s engine sputtered again, tossing Lucy forward, and then caught once more, accelerating. The interstate was close now.
Gunfire exploded in front of the car and Lucy wrenched the wheel to the right, nearly bouncing them off the road.
The Suburban heeled the curb and then dashed into shadow underneath the overpass. They jumped the curb and bounced up the concrete slope where the interstate met its supporting struts. Lucy mashed the brakes, and the SUV
slewed to a stop—but not before the roof hit an I-beam strut high up the slope, just beneath where cars passed overhead.
The roof crumpled.
Martha screamed.
Lucy had seen television shows in which people took refuge from tornadoes in this same space. It had to be better than open road against an armed warship.
“What the—” Robbins spluttered. “What the fuck is happening? It’s just . . . it’s absurd.” He fumbled at his waist and withdrew a phone. He flipped it open and peered into its face.
Lucy reached between the seats and grabbed her purse. She turned to Martha.
“Get out! We’ve got to get out of the car! If they can, they’ll blast this thing into vapor.” She pointed to the other side of the overpass’s belly, the shadowy area where the bridge began. There were spaces between the I-beams where they could hide and it was doubtful that even the helicopter fire could penetrate the three-inch steel of the struts supporting the overpass. “There. Go there!”
Martha sat still. Little tremors passed through her body and she looked at Lucy with wide, frightened eyes.
“Go now! We don’t know how much time we have!”
Lucy jumped out of the Suburban and wrenched open the back door. Martha spilled out, nearly dropping the bundle at her chest. Lucy peered into the car. Robbins blinked owlishly with a dazed look, muttering to himself, trying to make a call.
“No signal. How can there not be a signal? This plan is nationwide—”
“Robbins! Forget the fucking advertisement! We’ve got to go!”
He looked around, eyes fastening on Lucy. He slumped, almost imperceptibly, as if having his own private apocalypse. Painfully working his ass out of the SUV, he flopped forward, and Lucy caught him as he fell from the vehicle.
Martha had already made it halfway to the other side. Lucy grabbed Robbins’s hand and pulled him down the slope.
Unbearably loud now, the helicopters rumbled past, blowing hard gusts of wind under the bridge. Deafened by the helicopter, Lucy couldn’t hear any more cars or semis buzzing above them on the interstate. The sound became an absolutely monstrous sheet over her. It was hard for Lucy to even form a thought under its onslaught.
Lucy grabbed Martha’s arm to help her across the highway. She could feel the woman’s muscles twitch and spasm under her grip. The swaddled blanket shifted in Martha’s arms.
She glanced back and saw Robby slowly making his way down. Lucy released Martha and turned to help him but before she could move, an enormous wind hit her with the force of a hurricane, knocking her down and wreathing her in a deafening blankness. Within the din, she perceived another
bbrrrrppp
and the Suburban turned itself inside out, the twisting and screaming of metal piercing the thick, thunderous air. Robbins jittered and disappeared into a red mist that hung, particulate and thick, in the air.
Grabbing Martha’s hand, Lucy turned and sprinted across the remaining highway and up the opposing slope, dragging the woman behind her, toward the shelter near the top. She heard
another
bbrrrrpppp
and sensed the bullets howling through the air, but all she felt was a stinging sensation on the backs of her legs. Powdered concrete blew past her. She crouched in the dark recess of the overpass, where slope met supports.
“We’ll be safe here,” she said, almost to herself, as the machines’ noise diminished gradually.
Martha grunted. Lucy turned to look at the woman.
Her face was pale, and her cheek, just below the eye, twitched. Her arms spasmed slightly. Lucy reached over to touch Martha’s face, to test for fever, but the wild-eyed look the other woman gave her made Lucy pause and withdraw her hand.
Suddenly, the sound of the helicopter returned, overwhelming and vast. A hot wind blew through the space below I-40 and Lucy worried that the warship was now disgorging soldiers to root them out of their hiding spot. She peeked around the girder.
Hanging in air, fifteen or twenty feet above the ground, was the chopper. The black gunmetal of its carapace glinted evilly in the sunlight beyond the shelter of the overpass. The pilot, visible even through the tint and glare of the helicopter windshield, looked vaguely insectile in mirrored goggles, green helmet, and sound-suppressing headphones as he surveyed the space underneath the bridge. As the chopper rotated, presenting its side, the gun swept into view.
The pilot put a hand up to his ear, listening to something, and nodded. Suddenly the helicopter rose and the deafening roar of the rotors died away to a buzz and then faded completely.
“Holy shit,” breathed Lucy. She sank back against the
concrete slope and for long moments just let her heart hammer away at her chest.
A thought struck her and she sat upright.
“Why did they leave?” She turned to Martha. “Why would they leave us here? They had us trapped. I’ve got . . . oh no. Robby.”
Pushing herself to her feet, she dusted off her hands and walked swiftly down the slope toward the road, where the remains of the Suburban had blown.
Martha screamed.
The sound held no words, only garbled phrases. Martha flipped backward, tendons standing out on her neck, and her head hit the ground with a meaty
thunk
. She arched her back, balling her fists on her thighs. She continued to bend, and cracks sounded from her spine.
Opisthotonus
.
Martha had it, whatever it was. Whatever turned the clinic into a slaughterhouse. Whatever brought the dead back from the grave.
The infant spilled to the ground and rolled down the slope, unwrapping. It stopped at Lucy’s feet.
Lucy looked down. The baby’s hue wasn’t too different from the concrete’s. With small, chubby hands, it pulled itself toward Lucy, looking at her with those same milky eyes. It emitted a sound a crushed kitten might make, mewling.
The sirens began
screaming once she reached the blacktop of the interstate. The road had become as dead as the clinic,
almost. It was long minutes before any vehicle appeared. She could see a rising forest of smoke plumes coming from the south where she knew there to be a small residential area.
The trucker who picked her up was a brawny, thick man, bristly and unkempt. The cab smelled of cigarettes, energy drink, and corn chips. But the fecund normalcy of the man almost made Lucy want to cry.
“Shit, you’re bleeding.” He nodded at her head.
She touched the wound with delicate fingers. It didn’t hurt too much.