“Philly, I’m sorry … I’m a little jumpy.”
For a moment Philip looks like he’s going to take the other man’s head off, then the anger fades. “We’re all a little jumpy … I get that.”
“I’m totally sorry.”
“Just pay attention.”
“I will, I will.”
Brian speaks up. “What did you find out there?”
Philip reaches up to the stick shift. “A way around this damn mess.” He flips it into four-wheel drive and slams the lever down. “Everybody hold on.”
He turns the wheel, and they slowly roll across a spray of broken glass. The shards crunch under the Suburban’s massive wheels, and nobody says anything, but Brian’s thinking about the potential for flat tires.
Philip steers the vehicle down across the center median—which is a shallow culvert overgrown with switchgrass, weeds, and cattails—and the rear wheels dig into the rutted earth. As they approach the other side, Philip gives it a little more juice, and the Suburban lurches upward and across the eastbound lanes.
Philip keeps his hands glued to the steering wheel as they approach the far shoulder. “Hold on!” he calls out, as they suddenly plunge down a slope of muddy weeds.
The Suburban pitches sideways like a sinking ship. Brian holds on to Penny, and Nick holds on to the center armrest. Yanking the wheel, Philip kicks the accelerator.
The vehicle fishtails toward a narrow gap in the wreckage. Tree branches scrape the side of the SUV. The rear wheels slide sideways, then chew into the mud. Philip wrestles the wheel. Everybody else holds their respective breaths, as the Suburban scrapes through the opening.
When the car emerges out the other side, a spontaneous cheer rings out. Nick slaps Philip on the back, and Brian whoops and hollers triumphantly. Even Penny seems to lighten up a little, the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her tulip-shaped lips.
Through the windshield they can see the tangle of vehicles in the darkness ahead of them—at least twenty cars, SUVs, and light trucks in the westbound lanes—most of them damaged in the pileup. All of them abandoned, many of them burned-out shells. The empty vehicles stretch back at least a hundred yards.
Philip puts the pedal to the metal, muscling the SUV back toward the road. He jerks the wheel. The rear of the SUV wags and churns.
Something is wrong. Brian feels the loss of traction beneath them like a buzzing in his spine, the engine revving suddenly.
The cheering dies.
The car is stuck.
For a moment Philip keeps the pedal to the floor, urging the thing forward with his ass cheeks, as if his sheer force of will and white-hot rage—and the tightening of his sphincter muscles—can get the blasted thing to move. But the Suburban keeps drifting sideways. Soon the thing is simply spinning all four wheels, kicking up twin gushers of mud out the back into the moonlit darkness behind them.
“FUCK!—FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Philip slams a fist down on the steering wheel, hard enough to make the thing crack and send a splinter of pain up his arm. He practically shoves the foot feed through the floor, the engine screaming.
“Let up on it, man!” Nick hollers over the noise. “It’s just digging us in deeper!”
“FUCK!”
Philip lets up on the gas.
The engine winds down, the Suburban leaning to one side, a foundering boat in brackish waters.
“We gotta push it out,” Brian says after a moment of tense silence.
“Take the wheel,” Philip says to Nick, opening his door and slipping outside. “Give it gas when I tell ya to. Come on, Brian.”
Brian opens the rear door, slips outside, and joins his brother in the glow of the taillights.
The rear tires have sunk at least six inches into the greasy muck, each rear quarter panel spattered with mud. The front wheels are no better. Philip places his big, gnarled hands on the wood grain of the tailgate, and Brian moves to the other side, assuming a wide stance in order to get a better purchase in the mud.
Neither of them notices the dark figures lumbering out of the trees on the other side of the highway.
“Okay, Nick, now!” Philip calls out and shoves with all his might.
The engine growls.
The wheels churn, spewing fountains of mud, as the Blake brothers push and push. They push with everything they have, all to no avail, as the slow-moving figures behind them shamble closer.
“Again!” Philip shouts, putting all his weight behind the shoving.
The rear wheels spin, sinking deeper into the mire, as Brian gets sprayed with an aerosol of mud.
Behind him, moving through a fog bank of smoke and shadows, the uninvited close the distance to about fifty yards, crunching through broken glass with the slow, lazy, awkward movements of injured lizards.
“Get back in the car, Brian.” Philip’s voice has abruptly changed, becoming low and even. “Right now.”
“What is it?”
“Just do it.” Philip is opening the rear hatch. Hinges squeak as he reaches in and fishes for something. “Don’t ask any questions.”
“But what about—” Brian’s words stick in his throat as he catches a glimpse in his peripheral vision of at least a dozen dark figures—maybe more—closing in on them from several directions.
SIX
The figures approach from across the median, and from behind the flaming debris of the wreck, and from the adjacent woods—all shapes and sizes, faces the color of spackling compound, eyes gleaming like marbles in the firelight. Some are burned. Some are in tatters. Some are so well dressed and groomed they look as though they just came from church. Most have that curled-lip, exposed-incisor look of insatiable hunger.
“Shit.” Brian looks at his brother. “What are you gonna do? What are you thinking?”
“Get your ass in the car, Brian.”
“Shit—shit!” Brian hurries around to the side door, throws it open, and climbs in next to Penny, who is looking around with a bewildered expression. Brian slams the door, and smashes down the lock. “Lock the doors, Nick.”
“I’m gonna help him—” Nick goes for his goose gun and opens his door, but he stops abruptly when he hears the strange sound of Philip’s flat, cold, metallic tone through the open rear hatch.
“I got this. Do what he says, Nick. Lock the doors and stay down.”
“There’s too many of them!” Nick is thumbing the hammers on the Marlin, already with his right leg out the door, his work boot on the pavement.
“Stay in the car, Nick.” Philip is digging out a pair of matched log splitters. A few days ago he found the small axes in a garden shed of a mansion at Wiltshire Estates—two matched, balanced implements of razor-sharp carbon steel—and at the time he wondered what in the world some fat rich guy (who probably paid a yard service to split his firewood) would want a pair of small bad-axes for.
In the front seat, Nick pulls his leg back inside the SUV, slams his door, and bangs the lock down. He twists around with his eyes blazing and the gun cradled in his arms. “What the hell? What are you doing, Philly?”
The rear hatch slams.
The silence crashes down on the interior.
Brian looks down at the child. “I’m thinking maybe you ought to get down on the floor, kiddo.”
Penny says nothing as she slides down the front of the seat, and then curls into a fetal position. Something in her expression, some glint of knowing in her big soft eyes, reaches out to Brian and puts the squeeze on his heart. He pats her shoulder. “We’ll get through this.”
Brian turns and peers over the backseat, over the cargo and out through the rear window.
