The stoner kid whispers to Megan, “You gonna ask them or what?”
“Ask us what, Meg?” Lilly says.
Megan licks her lips. She looks up at Josh. “It’s totally fucked up, the way they’re treating you.”
Josh gives her a terse nod. “Appreciate it, Megan, but we really have to be taking off.”
“Take us with you.”
Josh looks at Lilly, and Lilly stares at her friend. Finally Lilly says, “Um, see, the thing is…”
“Safety in fucking numbers, man,” the stoner kid enthuses with his dry little nervous pot giggle. “We’re like totally in
Megan shoots her hand up. “Scott, would you put a cork in it for
Josh crosses his big arms across his barrel chest, looking at Megan. “You’ve done your share to stir things up.”
“Josh—” Lilly starts to intercede.
Megan suddenly looks down with a crestfallen expression. “No, it’s okay. I deserve that. I guess I just … I just forgot what the rules are.”
In the ensuing silence—the only sounds the wind in the trees and the squeaking noises of Bob futzing under the hood—Josh rolls his eyes. He can’t believe what he’s about to agree to. “Get your stuff,” he says finally, “and be quick about it.”
* * *
Megan and Scott ride in back. Bob drives, with Josh on the passenger side and Lilly in the narrow enclosure in the rear of the cab. The truck has a modified sleeping berth behind the front seat with smaller side doors and a flip-down upholstered bench that doubles as a bed. Lilly sits on the tattered bench seat and braces herself on the handrail, every bump and swerve coaxing a stabbing pain in her ribs.
She can see the tree line on either side of the road darkening as they drive down the winding access road that leads out of the orchards, the shadows of late afternoon lengthening, the temperature plummeting. The truck’s noisy heater fights a losing battle against the chill. The air in the cab smells of stale liquor, smoke, and body odors. Through the vents, the scent of tobacco fields and rotting fruit—the musk of a Georgia autumn—is faintly discernible, a warning to Lilly, a harbinger of cutting loose from civilization.
She starts looking for walkers in the trees—every shadow, every dark place a potential menace. The sky is void of planes or birds of any species, the heavens as cold, dead, and silent as a vast gray glacier.
They make their way onto Spur 362—the main conduit that cuts through Meriwether County—as the sun sinks lower on the horizon. Due to the proliferation of wrecks and abandoned cars, Bob takes it nice and easy, keeping the truck down around thirty-five miles an hour. The two-lane turns blue-gray in the encroaching dusk, the twilight spreading across the rolling hills of white pine and soybeans.
“What’s the plan, captain?” Bob asks Josh after they’ve put a mile and a half behind them.
“Plan?” Josh lights a cigar and rolls down the window. “You must be mistaking me for one of them battlefield commanders you used to sew up in Iraq.”
“I was never in Iraq,” Bob says. He has a flask between his legs. He sneaks a sip. “Did a nickel’s worth in Afghanistan, and to be honest with ya, that place is looking better and better to me.”
“All I can tell ya is, they told me to get outta town, and that’s what I’m doin’.”
They pass a crossroads, a sign that says FILBURN ROAD, a dusty, desolate farm path lined with ditches, running between two tobacco fields. Josh makes note of it and starts thinking about the wisdom of being on the open road after dark. He starts to say, “I’m startin’ to think, though, maybe we shouldn’t stray too far from—”
“Josh!” Lilly’s voice pierces the rattling drone of the cab. “Walkers—look!”
Josh realizes that she’s pointing at the distant highway ahead of them, at a point maybe five hundred yards away. Bob slams on the brakes. The truck skids, throwing Lilly against the seat. Sharp pain like a jagged piece of glass slices through her ribs. The muffled thump of Megan and Scott slamming into the firewall in back penetrates the cab.
“Son of a buck!” Bob grips the steering wheel with weathered, wrinkled hands, his knuckles turning white with pressure as the truck idles noisily. “Son of a five-pointed
Josh sees the cluster of zombies in the distance, at least forty or fifty of them—maybe more, the twilight can play tricks—swarming around an overturned school bus. From this distance, it looks as though the bus has spilled clumps of wet clothing, through which the dead are sorting busily. But it quickly becomes clear the lumps are human remains. And the walkers are feeding.
And the victims are children.
“We could just ram our way through ’em,” Bob ventures.
“No … no,” Lilly says. “You serious?”
“We could go around ’em.”
“I don’t know.” Josh tosses the cigar through the vent, his pulse quickening. “Them ditches on either side are steep, could roll us over.”
“What do you suggest?”
“What do you have in the way of shells for that squirrel gun you got back there?”
Bob lets out a tense breath. “Got one box of pigeon shot, 25-grain, about a million years old. What about that peashooter?”
“Just what’s in the cylinder, I think there’s five rounds left and that’s it.”
Bob glances in the rearview mirror. Lilly sees his deeply lined eyes sparking with panic. Bob is looking at Lilly when he says, “Thoughts?”
Lilly says, “Okay, so even if we take out most of them, the noise is gonna draw a swarm. You ask me, I say we avoid them altogether.”
Right then, a muffled thudding noise makes Lilly jump. Her ribs twinge as she twists around. In the narrow little window on the back wall of the cab, Megan’s pale, anxious face hovers. She pounds her palm on the glass and mouths the words
“Hold on! It’s okay! Just hold on!” Lilly yells through the glass, then turns to Josh. “Whaddaya think?”
Josh looks out his window at the long, rust-dimpled mirror. In the oblong reflection, he sees the lonely crossroads about three hundred yards back, barely visible in the dying light. “Back up,” he says.
Bob looks at him. “Say what?”
“Back up … hurry. We’re gonna take that side road back there.”
Bob jacks the lever into reverse and steps on it. The truck lurches.
The engine whines, the gravitational tug pulling everybody forward.
Bob bites his lower lip as he wrestles the steering wheel, using the side mirror to guide him, the truck careening backward, the front end fishtailing, the gears screaming. The rear end approaches the crossroads.
Bob locks up the brakes and Josh slams into his seat as the truck’s rear end skids off the far shoulder of the two-lane, tangling with a knot of wild dogwood, cattails, and mayapple, sending up a cloud of leaves and debris. No one hears the shuffling sounds of something dead stirring behind the scrub brush.
No one hears the faint scrape of the dead thing lumbering out of the foliage and clamping its dead fingers around the king cab’s rear bumper until it’s too late.
* * *
Inside the rear camper compartment, each of them tumbling to the floor in the violent pitching motions of the truck, each of them giggling hysterically, Megan and Scott are oblivious to the zombie now attached to the running board in the rear. As the Dodge Ram slams into drive and blasts down the perpendicular dirt road, they each climb back onto their makeshift seats fashioned out of peach crates, each still giggling furiously.
The air inside the cramped camper is blue from the haze of an entire bowl of sativa weed, which Scott fired up ten minutes ago. He’s been conserving his stash, nursing it, dreading the inevitable day he would run out and would have to figure out how to grow it in the sandy clay.
“You just farted when you fell,” Scott chortles at Megan, his eyes already dreamy and blistered with a major buzz humming behind his eyes.
“I most certainly did not,” she counters in her uncontrollable giggle, trying to balance herself on the crate. “That was my fucking shoe scraping the fucking floor.”
