Anne stands and hurries toward the front.
“We’ve got people waving us down, about a hundred yards up the road,” Marcus says. “Cops having some car trouble, from the looks of it.”
Anne braces her feet with a wide stance and takes a look through her rifle scope. Standing next to a state police car, two large men wearing black T-shirts and load-bearing vests and jeans wave at the bus, flagging it down. The badges on their belts glint in the morning sun.
Something is wrong with their faces.
Anne blinks, thinking:
The cops raise their guns, grinning at her across the remaining distance.
“Go, Marcus!” she screams, taking aim. “Keep going!”
Marcus obeys instantly, throwing the bus back into its highest gear and stepping on the gas. The machinery roars in response, lurching as it accelerates. Anne loses her footing and falls hard onto the floor, the rifle clattering away from her.
BANG BANG BANG BANG
Bullet holes pop through the windshield, spraying the interior with bits of glass. The Rangers drop to the floor, wrapping their arms around their heads. Marcus bellows with rage and pain, half out of his seat and driving blind.
BANG BANG BANG BANG
The bullets shatter the windshield and rip through the air, thudding into metal and bursting through the seats, sending bits of stuffing swirling around them. Wind rushes through the open windshield, carrying the faint tang of rotting milk.
Strickland asked about her spiritual health and she told him she was spiritually dead. He said she should return to her faith, which could serve as a source of strength for her as it has for so many others, reminding her there are no atheists in foxholes. Anne answered there are no believers either. There is just you, dying. And that is the true sadness of life.
You’re here, and then you’re not.
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG
The cops step aside as the bus roars past, emptying their guns at point blank range, the bullets punching holes through the thin metal skin of the vehicle.
The firing stops. Marcus straightens in the driver’s seat, his face flushed with rage. Anne climbs to her feet and looks through the back window to see the two cops standing in the middle of the road, staring at the bus as it zooms away from them.
“Who’s hit?” Anne says. She has to shout to be heard over the rush of wind whistling across the seats.
“Just glass,” says Ramona. “Nothing major.”
“I’m all scratched up,” Marcus says. “I’m all right, but I’m bleeding.”
Evan and Gary tell her they are okay.
“Ramona, get the first aid kit,” Anne says. “Gary, take a look at Marcus and let Ramona know where he’s hurt and how bad. Ramona, patch him up first if you can.”
“Shouldn’t we stop?” Gary says.
“Not after that. Those people who were shooting at us were Infected.”
“How can that be?” Evan says.
“Ray Young,” Anne answers. “Evan, I need you to fetch the machine gun.”
Despite everything that has happened, Evan grins. The M240 is his baby. He hurries into the back, dodging Ramona, and returns with the gun.
“Where do you want it?” he says.
“We’re going to mount it right up there next to Marcus where the windshield used to be.”
“Hot dog,” Evan says. “Here, take the gun. I’ll go get the ammo.”
Their boots crunch broken glass as they lug the twenty-six-pound machine gun to the front of the bus and mount it on the hood, the barrel resting on the integrated bipod.
Marcus glances at them as they set it up for firing. Evan pulls the charging handle, locking the bolt to the rear.
“Give me the ammo,” he says.
Anne opens one of the ammunition boxes and pulls out a long belt of shiny rounds, which he connects to the machine gun, sliding the first round into the firing chamber. Locked and loaded.
“We’re in business,” he grins, the wind ripping through his hair. “It’s set for a cycle of eight hundred fifty rounds per minute. Just keep feeding me the belt.”
“Gary!” Anne calls out. “Sit right there. When I say so, get behind Evan, brace your back against the pole here, and put your hands against his back right about here. Keep him stable, okay?”
“I can do that,” Gary says.
“Good idea,” Evan says, hunched over the machine gun, one hand wrapped around the firing handle and the other hugging the gunstock.
“You’re a long way from designing electrical circuits now,” Anne tells him.
Evan laughs into the wind. “Seems like a dream.” Past or present, however, he does not elaborate.
“People in the road!” Marcus says.
Anne raises her rifle and peers through the scope. A crowd of some fifty grim-faced people, holding knives and baseball bats and hockey sticks, stands in a line across the road next to a massive billboard proclaiming, WELCOME TO SUGAR CREEK.
“Fire, Evan.”
“They don’t look Infected!”
“Fire!”
“Anne!”
“FIRE YOUR GODDAMN WEAPON.”
The machine gun fills the air with its loud chatter as fifteen rounds per second rip downrange into the crowd, every fourth a streaming tracer. Dozens of people crumple under the withering fusillade, body parts and guts torn and hurled across the asphalt, while the rest charge howling, throwing bricks and waving their weapons.
A rock sails past Anne’s ear and falls into one of the seats behind her. The town’s welcome sign collapses into pieces. The snowplow strikes a rushing knot of people with a jarring bang and sends them cartwheeling into the fields bordering the road. Next to her, Evan fires, his body shaking, Gary holding onto his back and trying to keep the man steady. Anne feeds the belt into the machine gun, which spits the rounds at a murderous rate. She catches Marcus’s profile while he drives, ramrod straight in his seat, gripping the wheel with white knuckles, bleeding from a cut in his forehead, tears flowing down his stubbled cheeks and drying in the wind. She knows how much he hates this. The endless slaughter. He hates all of it.
The bus zooms down the town’s main street, scattering garbage and scraps of paper. Hundreds of people emerge from houses and buildings, throwing rocks and waving homemade weapons. Stones and shards of brick clatter against the sides of the vehicle.
Evan continues firing, cutting them down and chewing up the fronts of houses. Anne eyes the ammo belt’s shrinking length with alarm. The sides of the bus thud and vibrate as the Infected throw themselves at it. The street behind them fills with clouds of dust. Signs flash past proclaiming zero down financing, world famous tacos, propane for sale.
“Reload!” Evan screams. “Reload me!”
Anne pulls out the second belt of ammunition as the bus approaches another mob of Infected at the other end of town, arrayed in ranks like a medieval army.
