“Should we stop?”
“You listened to the broadcast too, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Lana’s hand found mine. “She looks terrified.”
“I know.”
We drove past slowly, cringing as the girl wailed at us, for us.
“Why do some of them sing and some of them cry?” Lana asked when we’d put the girl behind us.
I shook my head, unsure, then something occurred to me. “I think some of them act as bait and some of them act like flushers on a hunt.”
“Flushers?”
“They make noise and scare game out of hiding. I think maybe that’s how these things work. The singing ones scare us, making us run. The others lure us in with pleas to our emotions, making us easier to catch.”
Lana had her phone in her hands before I could suggest it, tapping words out furiously. When she was done she stared at the screen as if willing the boys to text back. The notification made us both perk up. “They said they’ve heard people crying and calling but they haven’t gone out. Jackson almost opened the door for one of them.” Lana had to stop, overcome by the same wash of terror I felt. “Tucker talked him out of it. Said he was being horror-movie dumb.” Her sob-laugh made me smile through my own need to cry. “Oh god. Who knew video games and horror movies would save them?”
“They did. Every time they argued to be allowed to watch one or buy one.”
She texted back to them, telling them we loved them, and telling them to continue to use their video game smarts to stay safe. “They said we need to remember to be smart too and to text them with questions if we get into a jam.” She covered her mouth. Her tears spilled over her hand to plop onto the screen.
“It’s okay. It’ll be okay,” I murmured, though I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.
9
Then
It still didn’t seem real, even when we had to backtrack because of a pileup or because too many of them were in the road. They didn’t always follow the car as movie zombies would. They weren’t dumb killing machines taking after any old thing they heard hoping it would be something to eat. They were smart, or at least smarter than the monsters my boys’ movies had promised we’d see during the apocalypse.
“How the hell are we going to make it across the country if it’s all like this?” Lana asked, her eyes on the small crowd of them on the doorstep of a duplex. Two of them stood outside, calling out someone’s name. Another stood outside a window holding up a little girl no more than four. The girl was screaming, and a man’s face appeared out the second-story window, mouth open, arms reaching.
I braked, though I didn’t know what we were going to do to save either of them. Who the hell knew if the little girl was one of them or if she was bait.
Maybe she was both.
“We have to do something.”
“Dee, no. You’ll die and we won’t get back to the boys.”
I rolled the window a crack, unable to look away, wanting to hear, wanting to see if I could figure out the truth, figure out what the fuck to do.
The girl screamed when the one holding her shook her little body. “Daddy!”
“Asha! Please, let her go. Let my baby go. I’m begging you, please.”
“Asha, please!” the one holding her cried, then the rest of them tittered and cawed, a horror-show laugh track.
“Hang on,” I said.
Lana had time to say, “What—” before I cranked the wheel and stomped on the gas. We bucked up over the curb and slammed through the crowd to the left of the girl and her captor. I slammed my hand down on the horn, then put the car in reverse and backed up far enough to see who was still standing.
Several of the ones I hit twitched on the ground, limbs twisted, flattened. A few got up despite their injuries, injuries that would have kept a normal human writhing on the ground in pain.
“This isn’t going to do any good,” Lana gasped. She gripped the Oh Shit handle hard, her eyes wider than I’d ever seen them. “How will we grab her?”
“I don’t know.” I peered up at the second-story window to see if the dad was still there, but the space was empty. Maybe he’d thought we were trying to run over his little girl and was coming to save her.
If he left the house now, he’d die.
“What if we drove close enough for you to grab the girl through the window? Like you roll it down just enough to grip her coat and then we drive off. You’d have to hang onto her tight, Lana. You can’t let go or she’s toast. But you have to keep your hands free too.”
“Oh, God. I don’t know.”
One of them slapped their hands on our hood. Another poked her fingers through my cracked window and I was glad I hadn’t rolled it down any further.
“Lana? They’re getting up and soon there will be more of them.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, her fist at her lips as if she were kissing a rosary. I guessed old habits died hard and, like the dead, rose again in the apocalypse. “Okay. Go.”
“One try. If you snag her, okay. If not, I don’t know what else we can do.”
She rolled down the window as I aimed us at the man, cutting to the left of him so Lana could reach out and grab. Her arm went around the girl’s legs and she screamed as Lana pulled, as the man yanked back. I goosed the gas a bit, just enough to give Lana some leverage and the man lost his grip. Lana lunged further
