thing roaring at them—the same thundering piece of metal that just an instant ago turned their fellow zombies into blood pudding—so they just keep coming.
Hunched over the wheel, teeth gnashing, knuckles white, Philip uses the wipers, with periodic sprays of cleaning solution, to keep the windshield clean enough to see through as he chews his way north, plowing the 8,300 pounds of Detroit iron through the moving sea of zombies. Varying his speed between thirty and fifty miles an hour, he carves a path toward the center of town.
At times, he is literally cutting a swath through a crowd so dense that it’s like blazing a trail through a thick forest of blood fruit, the flailing arms and curled fingers like tree limbs, clawing at the side windows as the Escalade digs through the walking excrement. At other times, the SUV crosses short sections of clear street, with only a few zombies trundling along on a sidewalk or at the edges of the pavement, and this gives Philip a chance to get his speed up, and to swerve to the right to a pick a few off, and then to the left for a few more, and then he’ll hit another wall-to-wall mob, and that’s probably the most fun, because that’s when the shit really flies.
It’s almost as though the viscera is raining down from above, from the sky, rather than from under the wheels or along the frame or over the top of the big front grill as the Escalade shears through the bodies. The wet matter streaks across the glass, again and again, with the rhythm of a giant pinwheel, a kaleidoscope of color, the palette like a rainbow of human tissue—oxblood red, pond-scum green, burnt-ocher yellow, and pine-tar black—and it’s almost kind of beautiful to Philip.
He roars around a corner and plunges into another mass of zombies coming down the street.
The strangest part is the continual repetitive flashes of similar tissues and organs—some of them recognizable, some of them not so recognizable. Entrails fly in all directions, splashing the windshield and sliding across the hood. Little kernels of teeth periodically gather in the wiper blades, and something else, something pink, like little pearls of fish roe, keeps collecting in the seams of the hood.
Philip glimpses dead face after dead face, each one flashing in his window—visible one moment, gone the next—and he’s in a zone now, he’s somewhere else, not in the SUV, not behind the wheel, but
Brian realizes what is happening before he even looks. Ten excruciating minutes after they started mowing through the sea of zombies—after making it across nearly twenty-three city blocks—the Escalade goes into a spin.
The centripetal force tugs Brian against the floor, and he pops his head up—peering over the seat—as the SUV slides sideways on the grease of fifty thousand corpses. He has no time to yell or do anything about what is happening. He can only brace himself and Penny against the seat backs for the inevitable impact.
Wheels slick with gore, the SUV does a three-sixty, the rear end windmilling through the last few stray cadavers. The city blurs outside the windows, and Philip fights the wheel, tries to straighten it, but the tires are hydroplaning on a sheet of intestines and blood and spoor.
Brian lets out a strangled yelp—part warning and part inarticulate cry—as the vehicle spins toward a row of storefronts.
In the frenzied moments before the crash, Brian glimpses a row of derelict shop windows: hatless busts of bald mannequins, empty jewelry displays, frayed wires growing out of vacant floorboards, all of it blurred behind the wire-meshed display windows. But it’s just a vague impression of these things, Brian’s vision distorted by the violent spinning of the SUV.
And that’s when the right side of the Escalade collides with the display window.
The crash has that suspension-of-time feeling for Brian, the store window turning to stardust, the noise of shattering glass like a wave slamming a breakwater as the Escalade punctures the burglar bars and plunges sideways into the dark shadows of the Goldberg Fine Jewelry Center of Atlanta.
Counters and display cases explode in all directions, a sparkling, silver sleet of debris as the gravitational forces yank all passengers to the right. The Escalade’s airbags deploy in tiny explosions—great heaving balloons of white nylon filling the interior before it has a chance to collapse—and Nick is thrown sideways into the white fabric. Philip is flung sideways into Nick, and Penny is thrown across the rear floor into Brian.
The SUV skids sideways for an eternity through the empty store.
The vehicle finally comes to rest after slamming hard into a weight-bearing pillar in the center of the store, shoving everybody hard against the padded lining of the airbags, and for a moment, nobody moves.
White, feathery debris snows down through the dark, dusty air of the jewelry store, and the sounds of something collapsing behind them creaks in the sudden silence. Brian glances through the cracked rear window and sees the front of the store, a pile of fallen girders blocking the hole in the window, a cloud of dust obscuring the street.
Philip is twisting around in his seat, his face ashen and wild with panic. “Punkin? Punkin? You okay? Talk to me, little girl! You all right?”
Brian turns to the child, who is still on the floor, looking woozy and maybe in some kind of shock, but otherwise unharmed. “She’s good, Philip, she’s good,” Brian says, feeling the back of the child’s head for any blood, any sign of injury. She seems fine.
“Everybody else okay?” Philip looks around the dust motes of the dark interior. A thin ray of daylight filtering across the store is the only illumination. In the gloom, Brian can see the other men’s faces: sweaty, stone-still with terror, eyes glinting.
Nick raises a thumb. “I’m good.”
Brian says he is, too.
Philip already has his door open, and is struggling out from behind the airbag. “Get everything you can carry,” he tells them, “but make sure you get the shotguns and all the shells. You hear me?”
Yes, they hear him, and now Brian and Nick are climbing out of the SUV. Over the course of a mere minute, Brian makes a series of observations—most of them, apparently, already calculated by Philip—beginning with the front of the store.
From the chorus of moaning noises and thousands of shuffling feet, it is clear to Brian that the zombie horde is closing in on the accident scene. The Escalade is finished, its front end nearly totaled, its tires blown, its entire length shellacked with gore.
The rear of the store leads toward a hallway. Dark, narrow, lined with drywall, the corridor may or may not lead to an exit. There’s no time to investigate. All they have time to do is grab their packs, their duffels, and their weapons. Dazed from the collision, dizzy with panic, bruised and battered, ears ringing, Brian and Nick each grab a goose gun, and Philip takes as many bladed tools as he can stow on his body, a bad-axe in each side of his belt, the Ruger and three extra magazines.
“Come on, kiddo, we gotta skeedaddle,” Brian says to Penny, but the child looks lethargic and confused. He tries to pull her from the mangled interior, but she hangs on to the back of the seat.
“Carry her,” Philip says, coming around the front of the SUV.
“Come on, sweetie, you can ride piggyback,” Brian tells the girl.
Penny reluctantly climbs out, and Brian lifts her onto his back.
The four of them quickly creep through the jewelry store’s back hall.
They get lucky. Just past the glass doorway of a back office, they find an unmarked metal door. Philip throws the bolt, and he cracks the door open a few inches, peering out. The smell is incredible—a black, greasy stench that reminds Brian of the time his sixth-grade class took a field trip to the Turner stockyards outside Ashburn. The smell on the abattoir floor was like this. Philip raises a hand, motioning for everybody to stop.
Over Philip’s shoulder, Brian can see a long, narrow, dark alley lined with overflowing garbage Dumpsters. But it’s the actual
Philip motions to the others. “Y’all follow me, and do exactly what I say,” he says, snapping the cocking
