“We won’t know until we ask. Oh!” She clutched at me when they open fired on a man who stumbled out of a nearby storefront. He dropped without a sound. “Was that … one of them?” she asked, the wobble in her voice telling me she wondered what I wondered.
“Surely it was,” I said, though I wasn’t sure about anything. What if they were shooting anyone who neared? What if it didn’t matter if he’d been one of them or not?
The cops’ shadows bounced frenetically in the strobing lights of their cars. They shouted things we couldn’t hear and were at work building up the barricade as the men on the SUVs kept watch. Suddenly, all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there, not confident at all that we wouldn’t be put down with the same efficiency as the man now bleeding out on the street.
One thing I was sure of: they didn’t know we were here. I’d turned our lights off to keep from announcing our presence to every one of them out there and as long as they didn’t get advance warning, they weren’t fast enough to block our passage. One or two or even five or more weren’t too much of a problem, but crowds of them were. We could only run over so many before the SUV would founder, get caught up on bodies and trap us. “What do you want to do?” I was aware that our brake lights were a shining red beacon, so I put our car in park and waited. “I need some sleep. We all do. But I’m not sure where we could go that’s safe.”
From the backseat, our passenger said, “I know a place. Wouldn’t trust these guys not to shoot first and lie about it later.”
I glanced back at her and caught movement. They were coming, drawn by the shot, probably. A few dozen, their songs just now audible in the night. “Where?”
“Turn into that parking lot and go out the right-hand side. My auntie has a house up there. She lives alone. Has a fence. Good security.” She rubbed her face with her hands. “If she’s one … one of them, she’ll be easy …” She swallowed. “She’s in a wheelchair.”
Lana and I were silent at the implications. Lana reached back and took the young woman’s hand. “Thank you. I’m sure she’s fine.”
The woman shrugged, but she didn’t pull her hand away.
I put the car into drive and pulled across the road into the parking lot, the monsters hooting and hollering after us, plaintive cries of, “Don’t leave me!” following us as I maneuvered around cars to the street beyond. We heard gunshots as we drove away.
The aunt’s house was scrunched up tight with its neighbors like Rod’s and April’s was, but there was a tiny garage for us to pull up in front of so we didn’t have to park on the street. I turned off the car and we sat in silence listening to the motor tick as it cooled. None of us wanted to get out even though we didn’t hear any of them right now. We didn’t see any either, but we watched for movement.
Finally, Lana reached for her door.
“Wait.” I squinted up at the dome light and find the switch to turn it off. “Okay. Ease the doors shut just until they click.” We slipped out and pushed the doors shut. Even the click sounded loud to my ears and I was sure we’d see them come screaming out of their hiding places, singing about our deaths, but the street—or our immediate vicinity at least—stayed quiet.
Our passenger—I really needed to ask her name—had a key and she let us in with shaking fingers. The small hallway was quiet and bare but for a small table placed under a mirror. A framed picture of a smiling family sat on the table, along with a blue vase and single, plastic flower. Our companion touched the frame with her fingers before turning to us. “I’m going to go knock on her bedroom door. Living room is in there. Bathroom over there. Kitchen.”
“Do you want us to come with you? In case …” Lana asked, and the woman shook her head.
“I need to go. If she’s sleeping, I don’t want to scare her with a bunch of strangers in her room, you know?”
We knew. Lana went to the bathroom and I went to the living room, cozy with faded, flower-patterned furniture and doilies draped over every stationary surface. A bookcase held religious books, more pictures, and various knickknacks of the ceramic angel persuasion. An old painting of Jesus hung above the couch, his eyes rolled up to heaven, his palms pressed together.
Everything was as neat as a pin as my grandmother would have said. She would have liked this place. It resembled her living room, except her religious poison of choice had been Catholicism. She had pictures of the Virgin Mary, candles, and a decidedly starved-looking Jesus hanging from a cross above her bed.
I’d always thought that was creepy, her obsession with the suffering of her savior. That and his bony hips jutting up from the strategically placed material draped to preserve his modesty. I’d always wondered what his dick looked like too, a question I managed to keep to myself. One, my grandmother wouldn’t have approved of me thinking about Jesus’s penis and two, she might have thought there was hope for the lesbian sinner that was her granddaughter. Dicks weren’t something I was normally obsessed with, except when they involved deep, religious ponderings.
“What are you thinking about?” Lana asked as she joined me on the couch.
“Religious dicks,” I said.
“Seriously?” She leaned into me and I put my arm around her. “If I’d known the apocalypse would turn you straight, I
