Drew tightened the final nut and stood up pleased with himself. His time may not qualify him for a place on a NASCAR pit crew, but he’d just changed a tire in the middle of an apocalypse without anything eating him. It was important to celebrate the little victories. Not that the feeling of satisfaction from changing a tire did a lot to balance the crushing losses they’d recently suffered.
His momentary pleasure at successfully surviving the tire change was short lived. LeBron yelled to him to hurry up and get in. Glancing over in the direction LeBron was staring he saw a group of crawlerz vaulting over the privacy fence surrounding the neighborhood where the one house was blazing away. The crawlerz were hitting the ground and sprinting in their weird all fours way straight for them. That was all the encouragement Drew needed to jump headfirst into the backseat of the Traverse.
LeBron reached over Drew and slammed the back door shut. He was yelling at Yue to drive. She’d already been accelerating the second Drews feet had left the ground for his desperate leap into the backseat. Bart was rolling around in the small third row where they’d seat belted him in. He’d been moaning in pain, so Yue had pumped him full of more painkillers. His bandages were hanging off him like he was some kind of dollar store mummy. Spots of blood standing out in bright scarlet on the cloth bands flapping around in the breeze.
Yue flicked the light on and then pulled back on the lever to turn on the high beams. Light from anything but the sun didn’t force the crawlerz into hiding. It did make them act even more erratic than normal, however. Not that they didn’t act erratically enough already. In the sudden surge of light Yue saw the group of crawlerz spilt off in multiple directions. One slowed down completely and began calmly walking towards them. The others seemed to be working on encircling the Traverse.
They couldn’t encircle what wasn’t there. Yue didn’t slow for the crawler walking towards them. She was kind of freaked out by the calm way it continued pacing towards them right up until she slammed into it at full speed. The other crawlerz were a much bigger problem. They sprang onto the roof and hood of the car. She was driving blind with an overweight older woman spread out across what was left of the smashed windshield. LeBron was pumping lead into the mass of pale white flesh squeezing into the car through the rapidly failing rest of the windshield.
The woman seemed pretty dead, but she wasn’t rolling off the car. She was stuck to the windshield like a massive bloody bug. Yue was hunched over standing on the floorboards to see out of the narrow gap of window left at the top. She was navigating like that while the rest of them were shooting out their own windows trying to get rid of the crawlerz who were crawling all over the speeding car. Drew was super impressed that Yue hadn’t crashed yet considering the conditions she was driving under.
Drew cussed himself out for jinxing them with his errant thoughts a second later when the car went into a spin on the side of the road. Luckily the spin was brought to a quick end by the impact with the telephone pole on the side of the road. They bounced off the pole and somehow ended up back out on the road. Best part of the almost dying in a fiery car crash was that it’d cleared off the uninvited hitchhikers. It’d also served to knock loose most of the rest of the glass that’d been trying to hang on in the windows.
The only one in the car with a seatbelt on was Bart. A quick check showed that he was still snoozing peacefully in the backseat. A testament to the healing power of modern pharmaceuticals. LeBron had tears in his eyes and was holding his wrist. Drew was bleeding all over the place from a cut on his forehead. Yue had managed to perform some cirque de soleil worthy acrobatics to maintain her grip on the steering wheel throughout the hydro sliding extravaganza.
Drew pulled his t-shirt most of the way off so that the shirt was hanging down his back. He moved it around gingerly so that the neck part was covering the gash in his forehead. It served the purpose for now of stemming the flow of blood into his eyes. He shifted the shirt around some as he slid over to check on LeBron. He poked LeBron in the shoulder to get his attention. LeBron looked up still holding one of his hands.
“What’s wrong with your hand?” Drew asked. LeBron held up his left hand. The top half of the pinkie finger on that hand was basically just dangling off the rest of the finger by the skin.
“It hurts so bad.” LeBron stuttered out.
“I bet it does.” Drew said with all the empathy he could muster. What he wanted to say was that it looked pretty damned disgusting. He kept that thought to himself and started poking around for something to set his brothers finger with. It wasn’t the same as checking WebMD, but he did ask Yue what she thought they should do. All that either of them could come up with was feeding LeBron some drugs and taping up the finger. They’d leave the tape on for a few weeks and hope it magically healed.
He found the tape in the box of medical supplies they’d left in the car and turned back around to LeBron. He was a few shades paler than usual. Probably because he’d been listening to the medical consult between his siblings. The shrugs and confused sounding whispers of ‘I don’t know’ probably hadn’t filled him with a whole bunch of confidence. Not
