It’s happening.
“Pull over,” Mille hears herself says.
The Arab looks at her uncertainly. “Hospital here?”
“No. Just pull over.”
“We’ve got to help him, Mille,” Krista whines. “How do you do it …?” She bends over, and for a crazy second Mille thinks she’s attempting to kiss him back to life, like Snow White in the fairy tale. Then Krista starts blowing into his mouth.
“Stop that, Krista,” Mille says, unbuckling her seat belt.
“I think it helps,” Krista cries and blows helplessly into Mads’s mouth.
The car has stopped.
“Krista, stop that! Get out of the car!” Mille opens her door and jumps out. She runs around the car and is just about to open the back door, when her gaze falls on Mads’s face through the window. At that exact moment, he opens his eyes.
It’s no longer Mads’s warm, friendly, hazel eyes with that stupidly charming glare. It’s no longer anybody’s eyes. They’re blank, white, dead.
What happens next plays out in slow motion.
Krista bends down once again to blow into Mads’s mouth, but then gives off a noise of surprise and says: “My gosh, it worked!”
Those are the last discernable words out of Krista.
Mads sits up abruptly and sinks his teeth into her chin. Krista screams and tries to push him off, but he’s clamping on like a Rottweiler and buries his fingers in her hair, pulling her down farther. Then he makes a violent tug with his head, ripping off most of the skin from Krista’s chin. The lower lip tears in two, exposing the teeth in a gruesome smile. The blood gushes out and Krista screams shrilly in pain. It only takes Mads a few seconds to gobble down the chunk of skin, then he shoots up again, this time biting into the soft tissue of Krista’s throat, turning her scream into a croak.
Mille doesn’t see any more than that. She doesn’t hear anything either; not her own drumming pulse, not the Arab’s panicked yells, not even the blaring of the car horns as she staggers backwards out into the road. She simply turns her eyes to the sky and faints.
SEVEN
“Fuck, why doesn’t she answer?” Janus lowers the phone and looks in at the supermarket as they pass by.
William stops at the red light and looks at him. “She at work?”
“Yeah. Do you mind pulling over?”
William puffs out his cheeks. “I don’t know, man. I don’t think it’s a good idea. Time’s running.”
“Five minutes, tops.”
“All right. But you go in alone, I’ll stay here in the car.”
“Fair enough. You mind turning that off?” He nods at the radio.
“Why? I already turned it down.”
“It’s distracting.”
“I find it calming.” Still, William turns it off, interrupting Axl Rose who is singing about a lovely place with green grass and pretty girls.
The lights shift and William is just about to go, when a silvery station wagon cuts out in front of him. Its hazard flashers are on, so William hits the brake.
“What do you think happened there?” Janus asks, following the station wagon with his eyes as it passes by in front of them.
William gets a glimpse of a Middle eastern man behind the wheel and a teenage girl on the passenger seat. “No idea,” he mutters. “But I guess they’re headed for the hospital.”
He makes a U-turn and is just about to pull into the parking lot of the supermarket, when he notices the station wagon stopping abruptly a little farther ahead. The passenger door is opened, and the girl comes out. She runs to the opposite back door, then stops dead, as though she sees something terrible inside the car.
“What are you waiting for, man?” Janus asks.
William realizes he has stopped in the middle of the road. “Something is going on over there,” he mutters and points.
Through the back window of the station wagon, he sees the driver turning his head and yelling something. Two figures on the backseat seem to be wrestling.
The girl is still standing there, one hand to her mouth, and now she starts walking backwards, right out into the road, her legs looking wobbly. An oncoming car honks at her, but she doesn’t even flinch; she just collapses, as though the horn blew her over.
“Fuck!” Janus exclaims. “What happened to her?”
William is pretty sure he knows what’s going on inside the station wagon, and he also knows the girl on the asphalt only has a few minutes—maybe seconds to live—before someone runs her over. He pulls over, yanks the hand brake and jumps out. He runs to the girl, just as the Arab guy comes tumbling out of the car and opens the back door. He yells something which sounds like: “Stop that! Stop that!” and reaches in with both arms, but pulls them quickly back out with a roar of pain, clutching his right hand, where two of the fingers are clearly missing.
William reaches the car and looks inside. The sight is even more awful than he anticipated—no wonder the girl fainted. Everything is drenched in blood. Most of it seems to come from the girl, who’s lying splayed out on her back, arms and legs twitching. Her throat looks like chopped tomatoes and she’s either dead or a few seconds away from dead. Above her sits a young guy in a bloody T-shirt with his face buried in the crater that is the girl’s throat.
Apparently sensing new prey, the zombie turns its eyes up, fixing them on William. They look exactly as dead and inhuman as the eyes of the girl William met in the basement of the hospital. The guy’s face is shiny red from fresh blood.
William grabs the door and slams it. But one of the girl’s legs gets in the way, preventing the door from closing all the way. William is not about to begin shuffling her around, so he abandons the effort and steps back, looking around for the Arab
