“I’m okay,” a third one said. “Okay! Okay! Okay enough for what it’s worth. Okay!”
They were like broken dolls, their batteries corroded, their memory chips rusted, stuck on a word or a phrase, never to speak sensibly again.
They were dolls, I told myself, not people. Never people. Not anymore.
27
Now
Her time driving on the interstate comes to an abrupt end. A semi lay jackknifed across the road in front of her. On the other side, there are cars piled up in the road in a long, tangled mess. People who had tried to get out of the city, she supposes. Most of the doors stand open. There are bodies everywhere and she has no idea if they’re really dead or just waiting.
She doesn’t want to find out.
She finds an entrance ramp and takes it, then makes her slow and halting way southwest. If only that damn semi driver had kept their shit together … She huffs out a breath and then slows.
There are monsters everywhere. They sit, they stand, they clump in bunches and just stare at each other with dead eyes. Dead eyes that come to life when they spot her. There is no way in hell she’s getting past them and as soon as she’s enough into the city, they will surround her car, force her to stop with their sheer numbers and then they will get in and eat her.
She should have known she wouldn’t make it. She should have known the city would be impassable but she had hope, damn it. The hope that she would find her boys had stayed with her through all these hellish days.
She sits in her car with the engine idling, as she stares at the crowds of them in the roadway ahead. Too many to crash through—Dan told Ivy that, so long ago. No way to drive around. If she backtracks, she’ll get farther away, and she doesn’t think she can afford the detour. Who knows what else she’ll run into if she does?
She watches as they notice her, as heads turn, as the calls start up, broken and rotten though they are. She watches and cries helpless tears.
When those tears dry, because they don’t last long, of course they don’t, she’s seen too much to indulge in tears anymore, she studies the area again. She needs a distraction, a big one. She needs explosions. She needs their attention to be directed somewhere else. She needs them to move away long enough for her to drive through.
She has a helluva long way to go and no way of knowing what she’ll find when she gets there, but she has to try.
So, explosion.
There’s a gas station in her rearview. She may even be able to get to it if she lures the crowd ahead away with her horn.
As she drives slowly to the left, honking as she goes, she considers how hard it might be to cause an explosion. Perhaps it will be something as simple as spilling some gas on the ground and hoping things catch fire. She’ll have to move fast, not only because she doesn’t want to get caught up in what will hopefully be a big boom, but because they will come for her once they spot her.
“Go in, try the pumps for power. Spill gas. Light it. Come back here. Wait. Drive in the opposite direction.” Get caught farther on because an explosion here won’t make a damn bit of difference later. “Shit.”
Still. She can drive fast. Ish. As fast as she dares, as the roads allow.
And if there’s a blocked road? And they fall in behind you?
The boys. She has to get to the boys. Which means she has to try even if it kills her.
So, explosion.
The crowds are thick behind her and she accelerates, leaving them behind. She cuts around and around again until she’s back where she started. There are still a few zombies remaining, but not enough to stop her from driving past. She honks as she cruises by, picking up more zombies to lure away, studying the pumps as she does. Without power, she won’t be able to get any gas out of them, so her first thought—pumping gas onto the ground and lighting it—is already dead in the water.
One of them steps out in front of her, holding his hands out to her in supplication. “Elp! Elp, elp!”
She jerks the wheel to the left, clips the man with her bumper. The crunch of bone and flesh is horrific, but it doesn’t make her cringe like it used to. As she straightens the truck, she catches sight of a line of colorful lids set in small humps in the ground. Right. The delivery trucks add the gas directly to the underground tanks. If she can get one of those lids off and drop something with a flame down there she might be able to get the distraction she’s looking for.
She just has to figure out how to do that without getting exploded herself.
She thinks about the supplies she has in the SUV. Extra gas, sure. Clothes. Tools. Food. If only she had a fuse, a long, cartoonish one …
There’s rope. She has rope.
She leads the dead things away and circles back, then shuts off the engine and takes a good long look around her, taking her time, unwilling to make any mistakes now. She doesn’t see any of them, so she gets out, leaving her door open so she doesn’t have to worry about the sound. She lifts the back hatch and rummages through her things, pausing to take in her surroundings so she doesn’t get sneaked up on.
The longest rope is about twenty feet in length, but she isn’t sure how far it will need to drop into the tank to do any good, so she takes all three back to the cab of the SUV and carefully knots them together. When that’s done,
