The bite on her knee was an ugly purple.
Lana grunted, trying to readjust her grip. “I can’t hold her, she’s just—”
“Drop her! She’s been bitten!”
I heard the father yell out, “No!” but I couldn’t turn around. The girl gripped Lana’s coat sleeve with dirty fingers, jerking her body not to get away from my wife but to turn her head far enough to sink her teeth into her.
“Drop her? No, I—” Lana screamed when the girl bucked, wriggling her little body further into the car, her little mouth working, her growl a thing of pure horror.
Another scream, cut off. I didn’t turn though I knew they were probably coming for us now because they had one of their own in the car with us. Lana had reversed her motions, was trying to shove the little monster out the window, Lana’s cries products of her terror. I yanked my hand back twice to avoid those teeth, then managed to get a grip on her curly blond hair while Lana shoved her legs. As soon as her bodyweight shifted, she fell out of sight.
I pushed the window button and got us the hell out of there.
The little girl’s dad was under a dogpile of them.
We didn’t talk for a good long while.
“We can’t do that again.” Lana’s voice shook, the tears evident in her watery words.
“Save people?” My incredulity must have been plain because she snapped around.
“Yes. We’ll end up dead. And our boys will never know what happened to us. It’s not fair to them. Not fair at all and I’ll be damned if I sit here …” She gasped, tears overwhelming her for a minute. When she caught her breath again, she said, “I’ll be damned if I watch you get torn apart doing a good fucking deed. Do you hear me?”
The entirety of the apocalypse heard her, but I wisely kept my mouth shut.
10
Now
It’s snowing. At first it’s just a few fat flakes, the kind their boys liked to catch with their tongues. It blankets the world and hides the ugly bits, hiding them with fairy magic. Soon, though, the weather changes and what was magic becomes danger. She is a hundred miles down the road from the old woman with the brush. A hundred miles closer to home but she has to stop again so she doesn’t wreck.
She’s gone through too much not to make it. If she dies now, it will have all been for nothing.
Her insignificance overwhelms her and she slows while she cries, while the world around her turns whiter and whiter, while time and death and distance do their best to bury her.
When she is able to concentrate again on things outside, the snow has eased. Her borrowed vehicle hums quietly in the middle of the interstate, its engine faithfully pumping hot air into the cab. She presses the button on the GPS and a woman’s chirrupy voice advises her it’s five miles until the next exit.
She’ll look for a farmhouse, one with a fireplace. Maybe she’ll get lucky and there will be food. Her stomach growls as if to say it thinks this is a good idea. Maybe she can have something hot. In a blizzard, they won’t be out. Some will be frozen. Others will be hiding in houses, waiting.
She hates them, the hiders. They are everything she feared as a little kid worried about monsters in the dark, monsters under her bed.
She will use the gun this time. It makes her feel brave, its weight, and in a storm its report will be muffled, maybe, or scattered. She doesn’t care if its neither at this point because now her stomach and her brain are determined she will get a hot meal and one that she doesn’t have to crouch in a corner in the dark to eat.
She turns off the interstate onto a two-lane highway that goes on for a few hundred feet. A left and another left and she’s in a small compound of farm buildings. A garage, a house, another house, a chicken coop. So many places for them to hide. But she has the gun, she reminds herself.
She has to dig through the pack to find it, then she pats her knife to make sure it’s on her hip. She does this out of habit, out of self-preservation. It’s a talisman against the biting, hungry things that wait for her out there.
Her stomach cramps at the thought of getting out of the SUV, of being vulnerable, and she has to breathe through it. When the pain in her stomach is gone, she does her best to set the fear away, far away. She can’t let it overwhelm her if she wants to get into the house. Not if she wants to survive.
She leaves her pack in the car and gets out, locking the door by hand before easing it shut. They can open doors when they’re fresh and having one surprise her later is not on her list of shit she wants to deal with ever.
The wind is biting and drives sharp needles of snow into her cheeks. She thinks it’s March and knew even before she tried that it would be a crap shoot going over the Rockies so close to winter. Hell, she remembers news stories of snow blocking the passes in June. But she couldn’t wait until June. She hadn’t wanted to wait until March but …
She grips the gun and waits even though the wind hurts her skin. They are patient so she has to be patient too.
It becomes a game. They hide. The human waits. They watch. The human watches. Until one of them makes a mistake.
Guess which one almost always makes the mistake?
She has learned these things whether she wanted to or not
