the ferocity of napalm.
Brian doesn’t look back as he scoops Penny off the ground and follows Nick in a desperate run for the barbershop.
Brian, Penny, and Nick get halfway to the next safe zone when they realize that Philip is lagging behind them.
“What the hell’s he doing!” Nick’s voice is shrill and frantic as he ducks into the doorway of another boarded storefront.
“Hell if I know!” Brian says, ducking into the doorway with Penny, gazing back at his brother.
A hundred yards away, Philip is yelling something obscene and inarticulate at the monsters, swinging his iron weapon at an attacker. The flaming zombie comes at him in a wreath of smoke and sparks.
“Oh my God!” Brian shields Penny’s face. “Get down—GET DOWN!”
In the distance, Philip Blake is backing away from the mob with the lighter raised in one hand and the bloody iron raised in the other, some kind of Viking brazenness taking over now, all his pent-up rage coming out in a series of big, portentous gestures.
He pauses and lights a spreading pool of fuel seeping out from underneath the bus, and then turns and flees the scene with the full-tilt abandon of a ball carrier charging toward open field.
Behind him, the puddle of fuel catches and spreads, the blue flames billowing toward the massive steel girth of the bus. Philip traverses about fifty yards of wet pavement, cracking the skulls of half a dozen Biters along the way, while the fire crawls up the side of the bus.
A low, subsonic thump rises above the rain and moaning noises. Philip can’t see Brian and the others in the mist ahead of him.
“PHILIP! IN HERE!”
Brian’s howl is a beacon, and Philip dives toward the sound of it as the explosion rocks the ground and turns a dark, gray afternoon into the surface of the sun.
None of them gets a good look at it. They are all slammed against a door inside the boarded alcove, shielding their faces from the flaming shrapnel—pieces of the bus, jagged shards of metal bulwark, and fountains of glass— flying past the doorway. Brian manages to glimpse a reflection off the glass of a store window across the street: The explosion, half a block away, has launched twenty tons of bus straight up, a mushroom cloud of dazzling, horrifying fire, the force of the blast bursting open the cabin, the molten hot shock wave punching through multitudes of dead with the violent brilliance of a supernova—countless bodies swept away on the wave, incinerated in the furnace, some of them torn to pieces by the flying debris, the mortified body parts flying up into the storm-lashed sky like a flock of birds attempting to escape.
A flaming piece of fender lands fifteen feet from the doorway.
Everybody jumps at the clanging noise, their eyes wide with shock. “Fuck! FUCK!” Nick exclaims, hands shielding his face. Brian holds Penny in a locked embrace, speechless, momentarily paralyzed.
Philip wipes his face with the back of his hand and gazes around the doorway with the stupor of a sleepwalker just coming awake. “Awright then.” He glances over his shoulder, and then back at Nick. “Where’s this barber shop?”
SIXTEEN
Half a block south—in the darkness of a festering, airless tile room, among scattered remnants of
Bottles of hair tonic get emptied, and then filled with alcohol and plugged with wads of cotton. They also find an old, scarred Louisville Slugger hidden under the cash register. The baseball bat probably once warded off unruly customers or neighborhood punks looking to boost the day’s receipts. Now Philip gives the nascent weapon to Nick and tells him to use it wisely.
They scavenge for any other supplies they might be able to use. An old vending machine in back yields a handful of candy bars, a couple of Twinkies, and an ancient sausage stick. As they stuff their knapsacks, Philip tells them not to get too comfortable. He can hear noises outside—more dead encroaching on the area, drawn to the explosion. The rain is slowing down. Noises are carrying. They have to keep moving if they’re going to get out of the city before dark. “C’mon, c’mon,” Philip says. “Let’s get our asses in gear and get to that next zone—Nicky, you take the lead.”
Reluctantly, Nick leads them out of the barbershop, into the drizzle, and down another row of storefronts. Philip brings up the rear with the iron bar ready to rock, keeping a watchful eye on Penny, who clings with simian instinct to Brian’s back.
Halfway to the next safe zone, a stray corpse lurches out from behind a wreck, shuffling menacingly toward Brian and Penny. Philip lashes out at the back of its head with the hooked end of the iron prod—hitting it just above the six cervical vertebrae—so hard that the cranium detaches and hangs down across its chest as it collapses to the wet paving stones. Penny averts her gaze.
More cadavers are materializing in the mouths of alleys and the shadows of doorways.
Nick finds the next painted symbol, near the corner of two cross streets.
The star is scrawled above the glass door of a small shop of some sort. The store’s facade is draped in iron burglar screens, and other than a few frayed wires, broken neon tubes, and wads of gaffer’s tape, the display windows are empty. The door is shut but unlocked ( just as Nick had left it three days earlier).
Yanking the door open, Nick waves everybody inside, and they enter in a hurry.
In fact, they slip inside so quickly that nobody notices the shop’s sign over the door’s lintel, the letters formed by dark, cold neon script: TOM THUMB’S TINY TOY SHOPPE.
The front of the store, barely five hundred square feet, is littered with brightly colored debris. Overturned shelves have spilled their inventory of dolls and race cars and trains across the soiled tiles. A tornado of destruction has swirled through the shop. Wires dangle where mobiles once hung, the shattered plastic remains of LEGO sets and planes piled here and there. The feathery stuffing of ripped plush toys stirs like dead leaves in the slipstream of the visitors slamming the door behind them.
For a moment, they stand in the vestibule, dripping, catching their collective breaths, gaping at the startling ruins strewn before them. Nobody moves for the longest time. Something about the wreckage mesmerizes them, and keeps them glued to the threshold.
“Everybody stay put,” Philip finally says, pulling a handkerchief and wiping moisture from his neck. He sidesteps a mangled stuffed bear, and then he cautiously moves deeper into the shop. He sees an unmarked rear exit, maybe a stockroom, maybe a way out. Brian gently puts Penny down, and checks her for any signs of injury.
Penny stares at the sad rubble of decapitated Barbies and disemboweled stuffed animals.
“When I ran across this place,” Nick is saying from across the room, looking for something, “I was thinking they might have stuff we could use, gadgets, walkie-talkies, flashlights …
“What’s back there, Nicky?” Philip shoots a thumb at a curtained doorway in the rear of the store. The black privacy drape hangs down to the floor. “You get a chance to check it out?”
“Stockroom is my guess. Be careful, Philly. It’s dark back there.”
Philip pauses by the curtain, shrugs off his backpack and fishes in it for the small penlight he keeps in the side pocket. He flips it on, and he pushes his way through the drape … vanishing into the gloom.
Across the store, Penny is transfixed by the broken dolls and eviscerated teddy bears. Brian watches her closely. He aches to help her, aches to get everybody back on track, but all he can do right now is kneel next to the
