“Do what?” Brian is sitting cross-legged, bundled in his blood-spattered coat, on the other side of the little girl, careful not to speak too loudly. Nick dozes over by a workbench, zipped in a sleeping bag. The temperature has plunged into the forties.
“Suck her thumb like that,” Philip says.
“She’s dealing with a lot.”
“We all are.”
“Yeah.” Brian stares into his lap. “We’ll make it, though.”
“Make it where?”
Brian looks up. “The refugee center. Wherever it is … we’ll find it.”
“Yeah, sure.” Philip kills the rest of the bottle and sets it down. “We’ll find the place and the sun’ll come out tomorrow and all the orphans will find good homes and the Braves will win the fucking pennant.”
“Something bothering you?”
Philip shakes his head. “Jesus Christ, Brian, open your eyes.”
“Are you mad at me?”
Philip stands and stretches his sore neck. “Now why the fuck would I be mad at
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing … just get some sleep.” Philip walks over to the Escalade, kneels down, and looks under the chassis for something.
Brian climbs to his feet, his heart racing. He feels dizzy. His sore throat is better, and he stopped coughing after a few days of rest and rejuvenation in the Wiltshire house, but he still does not feel a hundred percent. Who does? He goes over and stands behind his brother. “What do you mean by ‘business as usual’?”
“It is what it is,” Philip mutters, checking the SUV’s underbelly.
“You’re mad about the cop,” Brian says.
Philip stands up slowly, turns, and comes face-to-face with his brother. “I said go to sleep.”
“Maybe I have a harder time shooting something that was once human—so sue me.”
Philip grabs Brian by the nape of the T-shirt, spins him around, and slams him back against the side of the Escalade. The impact nearly knocks the breath out of Brian, and the noise wakes up Nick, and it even makes Penny stir. “You listen to me,” Philip growls in a threatening, husky voice that’s both sober and drunk at the same time. “Next time you take a gun from me, you make sure you’re ready to put it to good use. That cop was harmless, but who knows about next time, and I ain’t gonna be the one babysitting you with nothin’ but my gonads in my hand, you understand? You read me?”
Brian is nodding, his throat dry with terror. “Yes.”
Philip increases the pressure on Brian’s shirt. “You better get past your namby-pamby bullshit sheltered life and start carrying your weight around here and stoving some heads in because it sure as hell is gonna get worse before it gets better!”
“I understand,” Brian says.
Philip doesn’t let go, his eyes glinting with rage. “We’re gonna survive this thing, and we’re gonna do it by being bigger monsters than they are! You understand? There ain’t no rules anymore! There ain’t no philosophy, there ain’t no grace, there ain’t no mercy, there’s only us and them, and all they wanna do is
Brian nods like crazy.
Philip lets him go and walks away.
By this point Nick is awake and sitting up, and staring agape.
Penny’s eyes are wide and she furiously sucks her thumb, watching her father storm across the repair floor. He walks over to the massive reinforced garage doors, pauses, and stares out at the night though the slatted burglar bars, his big gnarly fists clenched.
Across the floor, still pinned against the side of the Escalade, Brian Blake wages a silent battle to keep from crying like a namby-pamby-bullshit-sheltered-baby.
The next morning, in the lambent daylight filtering into the shop, they hurry through a breakfast of cereal bars and bottled water, and then pour the contents of three five-gallon jugs of gas into the Escalade’s tank. They find the keys in a drawer in the office, and they pack all their belongings in the SUV’s cargo area. The tinted windows are fogged with condensation from the cold. Brian and Penny settle into the backseat while Nick stands at the garage door awaiting Philip’s signal. Since the power is down—seemingly everywhere now—they are forced to spring the manual latch on the automated door opener.
Now Philip climbs behind the wheel of the Escalade and fires it up. The huge six-point-two-liter V-8 hums. The console lights up. Philip jacks it into gear and edges forward, giving Nick the signal.
Nick yanks the closest garage door, and the casters squeak, as the thing rises on its tracks. The light and air of the day explode through the windshield, as Nick hustles around to the passenger side door and climbs into the shotgun seat. The door slams.
Philip pauses for a moment, looking down at the dash.
“What’s the matter?” Nick says in a shaky voice, still a little nervous about questioning anything Philip does. “Shouldn’t we maybe get moving?”
“One second,” Philip says, reaching down to a pull-out drawer.
Inside a spring-loaded map case he finds about two dozen CDs, neatly organized by the former owner—Calvin R. Donlevy of 601 Greencove Lane S.E. (according to the registration in the glove box). “Here we go,” Philip says, rifling through the discs. Calvin R. Donlevy of Greencove Lane is apparently a lover of classic rock, judging by all the Zeppelin, Sabbath, and Hendrix in his collection. “A little somethin’ to help with the concentration.”
All at once a Cheap Trick disc goes in and Philip puts the hammer down.
The gravitational thrust of four hundred fifty horses pushes them against the seats, as the wide-body Escalade blasts off through the opening, barely making it through the gap without sideswiping the metal trusses. Daylight floods the interior. The buzz-saw guitar intro of the party anthem “Hello There” leaps out of the Bose 5.1 surround sound system, as they boom across the lot and into the street.
Cheap Trick’s lead singer asks if all the ladies and gentlemen are ready to rock.
Philip roars around the corner and heads north on Maynard Terrace. The street widens. Lower-income homes blur by on either side of the vehicle. A wandering zombie in a torn raincoat looms off to the right, and Philip veers toward the thing.
The sickening thump is barely audible above the roar of the engine (and the thunderous drumbeats of Cheap Trick). In back Brian sinks down lower in his seat, feeling sick to his stomach and worrying about Penny. She slumps in her seat next to him, staring straight ahead.
Brian reaches over and buckles her in and tries to give her a smile.
“Gotta be an entrance ramp north of here,” Philip is saying over the noise, but the sound of his voice is almost completely drowned by the growl of the engine and the music. Two more walking dead loom off to their left, a man and woman in tatters, maybe homeless people, scuttling along the curb, and Philip happily swerves and takes them both down like soggy bowling pins.
A severed ear sticks to the windshield, and Philip puts the wipers on.
They reach the north end of Maynard Terrace, the entrance ramp straight ahead. Philip slams the brakes. The Escalade screams to a stop in front of a six-car pileup at the foot of the ramp, a cluster of upright corpses circling the wreckage like lazy buzzards.
Philip snaps the lever into reverse. The pedal goes down, the rock music thundering. The gravitational force sucks everybody forward. Brian braces Penny against her seat.
A yank of the wheel, and the Escalade does a one-eighty, then charges back down McPherson Avenue—which runs parallel to the interstate.
They cross a mile of real estate in a couple of minutes, with kick drum and bass providing syncopated beats to the horrible thumping of errant dead, too slow to get out of the way, colliding with the massive quarter panels
