couple of Gummi bears your retarded little brother stuck on the chessboard.”
I felt the knee lift from my back. I looked up at Falconer towering over me, I met his eyes and found it easier to look into the barrel of his gun.
He said, “See, I would let you go so you can try to jump the quarantine, but
An orange blur had attached itself to Falconer’s crotch. It was Molly, her teeth buried right in the detective’s junk.
John grabbed my jacket and we stumbled into the closet. I pulled the door shut—
Cornfield.
“Yes!” screamed John.
We stepped out of a blue Porta-Potty, the middle one in a row of three at the edge of a construction site. To our right was the legs of a half-finished water tower.
In our various experiments with the doors over the months, we’d only found one—this one—that took you outside city limits. But not by much. No more than a quarter mile to the south of us we could see dots of military vehicles, parked along a road bisecting the field. A little bit of the cordon encircling the city. John pulled out his phone and said, “No reception. Man, you think they’re jamming the signal?”
“Dunno. If so we just gotta get far enough away, they’re not blocking it for all of America, right?”
“Well. Highway’s about a quarter mile that way.”
We went stomping across the expanse of broken cornstalks and mud of the harvested cornfield, tracing a similar path from that summer night when we saw the black convoy and found The Box. Fifteen minutes later, we got a good look at the traffic jam on the highway, a line of cars that extended across the horizon as far as we could see in both directions. In the distance to our left was the roadblock, a cluster of flashing police lights, Humvees and the muted echo of somebody shouting into a megaphone. They were trying to get cars to cross the median and go back the way they came, but due to people refusing to comply, or confusion, or just the general dipshit dysfunction of crowds, the whole process had resulted in gridlock. We both flinched as a helicopter swept overhead.
John glanced at his phone, then stuffed it back in his pocket. Ten minutes later we made it out of the cornfield and onto the grass along the shoulder of the road. We took a right, putting Undisclosed to our backs. To our left was a wall of cars and semis forming an automotive Great Wall of China that snaked over the next hill.
When we crested that hill, we saw that the shopping center just outside of town—a U-shape strip of stores encircling three sides of a huge parking lot—had become a gathering place for refugees. The parking lot was packed with vehicles, and more were parked in the grass along the entrance leading in. As we got closer we saw people standing around, on their phones, trying to get in touch with loved ones behind the barricades.
That prompted John to pull out his phone.
“I’ve got bars! Well, a bar.”
He dialed and said, “Hey! Shiva. It’s me. Huh? No, no. Look, Sheila, Dave and I need a ride. We’re right outside that strip mall with the Best Buy. They got the roads all blocked—what? Yeah, I don’t know. Did you say zombies? No. Your friends are morons. What? No. Why would we have anything to do with it? Uh huh. That’s fine. Can you still pick us up? Hello? Shiva?”
He put the phone away and said, “Call got dropped. Also, I think she broke up with me.”
“I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop but, uh, did zombies come up in that conversation?”
“Yeah, apparently the Internet is full of zombie rumors. People are stupid.”
“I guess that’s not any stupider than the truth.”
We made it to the shopping center parking lot. On one end was the Best Buy, on the other was a now-closed movie theater. Between the two was a row of storefronts, half of them unoccupied.
John said, “I didn’t know they had a Cinnabon out here.”
“We got to get a ride, John. My feet are killing me.”
We walked past a parked Greyhound bus and John said, “You think they’d let us on there?”
The bus was empty. I said, “I don’t know. Where’s it going?”
“Who cares?”
“Good point. Find the driver and see if you can buy a ticket. Or bribe him. I have four dollars.”
“I have zero dollars. You might have to blow him.”
I peered through the smoked front windows of the Best Buy and saw the store was absolutely packed with people, staring up at a massive bank of televisions along the back wall.
We went in and shouldered our way through the crowd. They were watching live news coverage of the chaos in Undisclosed on three dozen flat-screen TVs of various sizes. The Action 5 News Team was finding as many ways as they could to say the same thing over and over—that there was some kind of unspecified crisis in the town, that they didn’t know the nature of it but that it was huge and terrible and that we should all remain calm but glued to our televisions. Then they threw it out to star reporter Kathy Bortz, who was standing about one block from my house:
“Thank you, Michael. Look behind me. Fire trucks. Police cars. Military Humvees. A large RV that appears to be a mobile command center from the Centers for Disease Control. Numerous civilian vehicles. Behind them, a raging house fire. There is mass confusion here, folks. We heard gunshots when we first arrived, we have been told there are at least three bodies but that’s all we know. Personnel are—what was that? Did you catch that, Steve? Back on me. Ready? Personnel are swarming the scene. They’re trying to push back onlookers, as you can see quite a crowd has gathered around. Information has been hard to come by but what we know is that this is the same address where less than an hour ago neighbors called in reports of a shouting, bloody, naked man carrying what appeared to be—what’s that? Steve? No, there’s something on my—AH!”
Kathy swatted at her hair, like a woman who has realized a bee has nested there. Only two people in the Best Buy saw that it was not a bee.
She screamed. There was another scream, a man this time. Her camera guy, apparently, because the screen jerked and suddenly we were looking at the reporter’s feet. She wore tennis shoes. I always remember that part.
The knees of her pantsuit came into frame next. She was shrieking, convulsing. She fell flat into the grass. While the Action 5 News audience watched, the face of Kathy Bortz fell into frame. A three-inch-long strip of flesh was missing from her forehead, pink skull showing in the gash.
Gasps from the crowd around us. On the screen, Bortz shrieked, and shrieked. The strip of eaten flesh on her face grew, edging down, across her eyebrow. The invisible-to-everyone-else carnivore quickly chewed across her eyelid, then dug into her eyeball, spilling pale fluid down across the bridge of her nose.
The shot cut back to the male and female anchors. Perfect-haired anchor Michael McCreary blinked, looked off camera and said, “What the
The air in the store was charged with panic—that bottled-up, impotent panic of a crowd that doesn’t know how to act on it. Should they riot? Loot the place? Burn it down? Should they stampede out of there? To where? Cinnabon?
Instead, everybody just kind of stood shoulder to shoulder, mumbling to each other. A black woman next to me was crying, covering her mouth with one hand.
My cell phone screamed and half a dozen people around me almost shit their pants. On the screen it said:
AMY.
“Amy! Can you hear me?”
“Yes!”
“Did you hear the news?”
“Yes, David—”
“Listen to me! We’re okay. John and I both, we got out of town. Now, we may have to come up there and stay with you for a bit, we can’t go back to town because—”
