“Bob, you got your keys on ya?”
Bob looks at Josh. “They’re in the truck.”
“In the ignition?”
“Glove box.”
Josh turns to the others. “I want y’all to wait here, keep your eye on that walker, might be more in there. I’m gonna get the truck.”
Josh turns away but Lilly grabs him. “Wait! Wait!! You’re telling me we’re just gonna leave all our stuff in there, all our supplies?”
“No choice.”
He heads around the left side of the smoking pumps while the others stand there stunned and speechless. Twenty-five feet away, the SUV thumps, a half-ajar door creaking open, the firelight blooming. Lilly jerks. Megan gasps as another dead thing pushes its way out of the vehicle.
Bob fiddles a shotgun shell into the breech with shaking hands.
The others back away toward the road, Scott mumbling hysterically, “Shit, man, shit … shit … shit … shit … shit … shit … shit…”
The thing that emerges from the SUV, burned beyond recognition, staggers toward them, its mouth gaping with black drool. The back of its collar and part of its left shoulder still crackle with tiny flames, the smoke around its skull like a halo. Apparently an adult male, half the skin of its face burned off, it barely remains upright as it shuffles slowly toward the smell of humans.
Bob can’t get the shell seated properly, his shakes are so bad now.
No one sees the flare of taillights across the lot behind the row of wrecks, and no one hears the rumble of the king cab’s engine firing up or the squeal of its rear tires digging in as the engine roars.
The burning zombie approaches Megan, who turns to run and trips on a patch of loose gravel. She sprawls to the pavement as Scott cries out and Lilly tries to help her up and Bob struggles with the shotgun.
The walker gets within inches of them when the blur of metal appears.
Josh backs the Ram directly into the zombie, and the impact of the protruding trailer hitch impales the thing, sending the charred corpse flying in a cloud of sparks. The thing breaks apart in the middle, the torso flinging off one way, the lower extremities spinning in the other.
One of the blackened, sizzling organs strikes Megan in the back, splattering her with hot, oily bile and fluids. She lets out a scream.
The pickup skids to a stop next to them, and they pile in, yanking a hysterical Megan in through the back hatch. Josh floors it.
The truck barrels out of the lot and down the winding access road.
All told, a mere three and a half minutes have elapsed since the onslaught … but in that time, the destinies of all five survivors have irrevocably changed.
* * *
They decide to head down the hill and turn north, weaving through the forest toward the tent city. They proceed cautiously, with their lights off and eyes wide open. In the rear camper, Scott and Megan peer through the firewall window, while Bob and Lilly, side by side in the cab next to Josh, scan the landscape with feverish concentration. No one says a word. They all harbor the unspoken dread of investigating the extent of the damage to the tent city—the resources of the vast encampment now paramount to their survival.
By this point, dawn has broken, the edges of the horizon—pale blue behind the trees—already beginning to drive the shadows from the gullies and culverts. The air is bitter cold and scented with the char of recent fires. Josh keeps both hands on the wheel as the pickup snakes through the cool shadows rising above the tent city.
“STOP! JOSH! STOP!”
Josh stomps on the brakes at the zenith of a hill overlooking the southern edge of the camp. The pickup scrapes to a halt.
“Oh, my God.”
“Christ Almighty.”
“Let’s turn around.” Lilly chews on her fingernail, gazing through a break in the foliage. She can see what’s left of the tent city in the distance. The air reeks of burned flesh and something worse, something deathly foul, like a mass infection. “There’s nothing we can do here.”
“Hold on a second.”
“Josh—”
“What in God’s name happened down there?” Bob murmurs to nobody in particular, staring through the gap in the trees that opens like a proscenium above the meadow fifty yards below. Early-morning sunbeams shoot down through scrims of smoke, making the devastation look almost unreal, like footage from a silent movie. “Looks like Godzilla attacked the place.”
“You think somebody went crazy?” Lilly keeps staring at the smoking ruins.
“I don’t think so,” Josh says.
“You think walkers caused this?”
“I don’t know, maybe there was a big old swarm of ’em and a fire started.”
Down in the meadow, along the edges of the encampment, flaming cars sit in disarray. Scores of smaller tents still burn, sending up black gouts of smoke into the acrid sky. In the center of the field, the circus tent has been reduced to a smoldering endoskeleton of metal poles and guide wires. Even the hard-packed ground burns in places, as though someone spooned out dollops of liquid flames. Smoking bodies litter the grounds. For a brief, surreal moment, Josh is reminded of the
“Josh…”
The big man turns and looks at Lilly, whose face is turned away now, scanning the edges of the forest on either side of the king cab. Her voice lowers several registers until she sounds almost groggy with terror. “Josh … um … we have to get out of here.”
“What is it?”
“Holy fuckin’ Jesus.” Bob sees what Lilly sees, and the air in the cab crackles with tension. “Get us outta here, captain.”
“What are you—”
Then Josh sees the problem: the countless shadowy figures emerging from the trees—almost in synchronous marching order—like a vast school of fish stirred from the depths. Some of them still smolder with thin wisps of smoke leaching off their tattered rags. Others trundle along with robotic hunger, their curled claws outstretched. Hundreds and hundreds of cataract-white eyes reflect the pale light of dawn as they lock on to the lone vehicle in their midst. The hairs on Josh’s thick neck stiffen.
“JOSH, GO!”
He yanks the steering wheel and slams the pedal down, and the three hundred and sixty cubic inches roar. The truck lurches into a one-eighty, plowing through a dozen zombies and taking down a small pine in the process. The noise is incredible, the wet wrenching of dead limbs and snapping of timbers as the debris and blood kick up across the front quarter panel. The rear end wags violently, smashing into a cluster of walkers and tossing Megan and Scott around the camper. Josh pulls back onto the road and floors it, booming back down the hill in the direction from which they just came.
* * *
They barely make it to the adjacent road at the bottom of the hill before they realize at least three zombies have attached themselves, barnaclelike, to the pickup.
“Shit!” Josh sees one in his side mirror, clinging to the vehicle on the driver’s side, near the rear quarter panel, feet on the running board, tangled in strapping ropes, its tattered clothing caught in the camper’s metal trim. “Stay cool, everybody—we got some hangers-on!”
Josh concentrates on the road, making a wild turn, then heading north at a steady forty-five miles an hour, moving toward the main two-lane, purposely swerving in an attempt to fling the zombies off the pickup.
