Lorie was pulling, trying to get her body underneath the shutter for leverage. “The hinges must be bent out of shape from all those things pushing against it.”
“Hold it like that,” Jane said. “I’ll crawl under, then I’ll hold it for you.”
“Okay,” Lorie said.
Jane dropped down and lay flat on her back. She squirmed under the creaking shutter head first, looking up and backward to—
Too late.
There was one on top of her, one that must have been in a recess she hadn’t been able to detect from her position inside the entrance. She put her hand up just in time to stop it from falling on her.
The zombie was clawing, chomping, putting all of its weight on her hand. Jane went for her gun but her arm got caught in the holster’s strap. Her strength was letting up, and the stinking zombie was getting closer.
Then her body began to tingle, and she suddenly felt as if she were floating, far away, admiring the zombie’s dry mouth, devoid of drool.
That was something, her mind mused as it floated higher, no tainted saliva was dripping out of the mouth onto her, that was—
There was a flash, and then the handle of a knife appeared on top of the zombie’s head, then the zombie was gone, pulled off Jane. Then something was pulling Jane to her feet, shaking her.
Jane’s mind fluttered back down to her, somewhat reluctantly. She looked down at Lorie in her surgical mask—the mask! She had given hers to Sven.
“Come on,” Lorie said, “there’s just a few more and then we’re there. Luck’s on our side now.”
“What?”
Lorie pointed to the shutter. It hung in its position a foot above the ground. “No crushing for us today.”
Jane turned to the right and saw the last of the main mass of zombie horde turning the corner. There were less than a dozen zombies remaining in the parking lot now, loners.
The loner zombies set out on a half-hearted stagger toward Jane and Lorie.
“These ones look weak or something,” Lorie said, as she tried to dig her knife out of the dead zombie’s skull. “Damn, it’s stuck in there good, too deep.”
“That’s okay, just leave it.”
Lorie gave Jane a puzzled look. Then the girl dragged the zombie’s body and placed it so that the zombie’s head was under the shutter. Jane reached out a hand to stop her, but Lorie was already bringing the shutter down.
Jane cried out, turning and drawing her .460 XVR. She couldn’t watch that, couldn’t watch Lorie do—
Single action, Jane told herself firmly, trying to block out the rattling of the shutter’s hinges and the bone-breaking, stomach-churning, stop!
Single action! Jane screamed in her mind.
With tears brimming on her eyelids, she cocked, aimed, and shot. The noise and recoil were comforting in their physicality.
Four zombies fell victim to the first four rounds—a zombie for each.
Jane cocked the gun again, the final round before she had to reload. There were less than a dozen now, and the ones that had turned the corner made no sign of returning.
A glint of inspiration lit in her mind. Two zombies were almost aligned in a way that—
She circled around, putting the two zombies in her mental crosshairs. She aimed, then stopped herself just in time.
Jane’s body went cold when she realized what she had almost done.
She had lined up her shot against the car. If she had shot, she would have risked damaging their means of escape. There were other cars in the lot, many with the keys still in them, but with potentially empty or near-empty gas tanks, and zombie drivers still trapped within them. It wasn’t a risk worth taking.
Lorie came up at Jane’s side. “You okay? I got it! It only took a few cracks to loosen it and then—”
Jane blocked the rest out and circled around closer to the car. She lined up the two zombies again and pulled the trigger.
Both zombies’ heads exploded into an indiscernible spray. Headless, the zombies fell and lay still.
Lorie whistled. “Nice shooting.”
Jane reloaded the big gun, noting that she had fewer than ten rounds until the gun became useless.
The rounds went quickly, and with each round, a single zombie fell. There were no more double shots.
There were four zombies remaining as Jane stood in the parking lot, clutching the now useless .460 XVR. She didn’t want to let it go, to leave it for the damned undead to shamble over, but it was dead weight now, like the zombies.
Anger built in her at the loss of the gun. She looked at it in her hand, knowing it was time to let it go, to let Sven go, time to—
Summoning a long-dormant fury from the depths of her soul, she strode straight to the tall, overweight zombie shambling toward her. She kept herself just out of reach of his arms, staring up into his dead face. Dry strips of flesh hung down around his cheeks and jaw. His dark eyes were small and sunken, wobbling about in their putrid sockets as he shambled. There was so much wiggle room in the sockets, so much—
Jane would let the gun go, she decided, on her own terms.
Inadvertently in time with the zombie’s hungry moan, Jane plunged the barrel of the .460 XVR into the wiggle room of the zombie’s left eye socket, pushing against the butt of the gun and feeling the barrel rip through rotten flesh until it was lodged securely in the zombie’s brain.
The zombie slumped and fell forward, toward Jane. She stepped out of the way as she let go of the gun’s handle. The falling zombie pivoted, landing on its side and then rolling onto its back, the magnificent revolver sticking out from its head.
This was no stupid movie where when the heroine ran out of bullets she threw the gun at the villain, only for the villain to duck out of the way. The .460 XVR was not a weapon to be thrown. It was to bring death to others even in its own demise. And Jane had made it so.
She looked over to see that Lorie was staring at her, open-mouthed. Jane nodded, pulled the Beretta from its holster and made quick work of the three remaining undead. It wasn’t nearly the same, but it got the job done.
Jane unlocked the car. “Get in.”
She took a last look at the .460 XVR, properly buried, its butt sticking out of the zombie’s skull. Then she climbed into the driver’s seat, started the car, and put it in drive.
She knew what was to happen next. As soon as the zombies showed, they would drive off. They had to.
Only moments later, her hands tightened on the wheel when she saw the small group of undead, now shambling out of the woods, on a direct course for the car.
Jane’s foot remained firm on the brake pedal as she held her breath.
Chapter 119
Lorie was holding the door handle, waiting for Sven. She would open it as soon as he was close enough to get in, he would get in, and they would drive off—that was the plan.
The car was already running and in drive. Jane’s fingers were squeezing the steering wheel as she searched the parking lot, eyes darting anxiously back and forth. Lorie watched Jane’s hands on the wheel, turning white with each squeeze.
Lorie hoped that Jane wouldn’t ask why Sven was taking so long. Jane didn’t. It was obvious enough, what else was there for either of them to think about at that moment? Sven had covered for them so that they could escape, and now Lorie was sure it had been too long since the last of the shotgun blasts.
Why the hell was he taking so long?
There was, of course, the obvious reason, and it flashed through Lorie’s mind constantly, making her sick as she tried to resist it. It was such a clean, simple explanation—an explanation to explain any and all tardiness in the midst of a zombie outbreak—death by zombie.
Lorie flinched away from the thought, and then she saw him, lurching out from the other side of the supermarket, looking for them, spotting them, and then stumbling quickly in their direction.
Jane spun around to look. “He—what’s wrong with him?”
Lor
ie couldn’t swallow, couldn’t answer.
What’s wrong with him? What the hell else could it be?
No, her mind screamed, no! This wasn’t true, it couldn’t happen like this, after all that they had gone through, after all that—
Then he was there, swaying over Lorie, motioning weakly for her to open the door.
“Wait!” Jane yelled. She was looking at Sven as if she had never expected his return, had not been awaiting it as eagerly as Lorie had been. Jane looked at him mournfully, as someone looks at a dead body, and Lorie felt herself grow angry. Jane had no right to give up on Sven like that, after what he’d just done for them. There was no reason for it.
Lorie didn’t wait. She opened the door.
Sven tried to climb into the car, but instead collapsed inward, knocking into Lorie. Ivan leapt in after his master, climbing onto the dashboard, tail puffed and turning in a circle. Lorie climbed farther into the car and over the divider between the driver’s seat and passenger’s seat, helped Sven get all the way in, and then reached over him and shut the door.
Jane took her foot off the brake, jolting the car into action. They sped out of the parking lot, careening around the new band of zombies emerging from the woods.
Not at all relieved, Lorie turned to Sven. His face was even paler than when he had left to create the diversion. His skin was clammy, and he was shivering, barely responsive. He turned a peculiar shade of green as Jane meandered out of the access road and swerved onto Route 29, and his eyes rolled shut, as if he were on the verge of losing consciousness.
Lorie saw that the shotgun was gone, as was the surgical mask that Jane had given Sven before he went off to distract the zombies.
“Sven,” Lorie said, “we made it.”
He didn’t respond.
“Sven, we…Sven?”
His head nodded forward, then he slumped sideways against the window, fingers slowly unfurling against the mallard ducks on his pants.
Lorie felt her body choked by despair, by—
She flew forward, landing with her back against the dashboard. The car fishtailed violently, and then they were still.
Lorie pushed herself away from the dashboard, the pain in her side and back radiating outward.
She decided it wasn’t that bad, and that she was physically alright, except that something worse was waiting for them.
She righted herself and looked out through the windshield.
Correct again, she thought.
The afternoon sun was heating up the car to the point of discomfort, and wanting some bit of relief in the last seconds of her life, Lorie reached for the air conditioner knob.
A blaring voice stopped her. “Turn around and go back the way you came, or we will open fire. This is your first of three warnings before we open fire.”
Lorie scanned the road in front of them. There were numerous rows of spike strips extending beyond the road through the wooded area between the lanes of Route 29. Beyond the spike strips were metal barricades. Beyond the barricades were military vehicles, extending up 29 as far as Lorie could see.
Soldiers clad in body armor and gas masks were scattered among the vehicles. They began to scurry into action.
They must be burning up in all that gear, Lorie thought, though she had to admit the gas masks were sure to be more effective than the surgical masks, if only Sven had a mask like that, then maybe he wouldn’t now be...
As if the ground portion of the roadblock weren’t enough, two helicopters flew up and down on a perpendicular flight path to the road, probably ferreting out fugitives unfortunate enough to be on foot, or fugitive zombies even.
In addition to the two helicopters in the air, Lorie thought she could make out the blades of another beyond the stripped-down cargo hold of a truck.
Jane lowered the window and yelled. “Where are we supposed to go? We’ll die back there.”
The soldiers positioned themselves, then raised their rifles, pointing the barrels at the windshield of the car. It seemed to Lorie like way too many soldiers just to take care of the three of them.
Another voice came on, gentler than the first. “You need to keep moving. The infection is waning. It’s ending. You can outrun it if you keep moving. Teams have been dispatched to secure the area, you are not alone in there.”
Lorie wondered what that meant. Teams have been dispatched to do what? To kill everyone? To napalm the place? No one was helping them, that was for sure.
More soldiers were dropping from the backs of trucks, joining others of their kind hurriedly surging toward the barricades. Lorie looked at the closest soldiers before her, pointing their rifles. A few were trembling.
Jane was breathing hard as she yelled back. “Just drive? Back to the zombies?”
The first voice came back on. “You cannot pass the point of quarantine. You must turn back. This is your second warning.”
Now most of the soldiers before Lorie were trembling like rickety robots, like mass-produced, impersonal killing machines stuck on vibrate. They were there to keep whatever was happening from spreading, to keep Lorie, Jane, and Sven trapped in the nightmarish stretch of road where the infected shambled, eager to bite and tear and—
“The bastards,” Lorie said, letting her face turn into a snarl. “This is all their fault. Why aren’t they helping us?”
“This is your third and final warning. Turn back now.”
“Our tax money at work,” Jane hissed. She put the car in reverse and began to back up. Then she completed a three-point turn, facing the car south in the northbound lane of Route 29.
She drove south until there was a gravel turnaround. She took it and entered the southbound lane, not that it mattered—theirs was the only moving car on the road.
As they drove back the way they had come only the previous day, Lorie noticed that it had grown much quieter.
The engines of the cars that they passed didn’t run, and there was no drone of zombies scratching at the insides of their cars. The zombies in their cars were still trapped, but they no longer moved, their bodies lay still, slumped against windows and steering wheels, or slumped toward the passenger seat but kept in place by their buckled seatbelts.
There was no noise save for that made by Sven’s car, Sven’s ragged gasps, and the soothing chirrup of birds.
“They’re coming apart,” Jane said, as they drove farther away from the Wegmans. Lorie looked and saw that Jane had slowed down and was peering into some of the cars, in which the zombies seemed to be deteriorating.
Maybe it was ending!
Maybe the military people, untrustworthy and loathsome as they were, had been telling the truth about this being the end of the outbreak.
On the verge of a joyful outburst, Lorie felt her jubilation die as her eyes passed over Sven. He looked just as Evan had before…
Lorie noticed they were pulling into a strip mall. “What are you doing?”
“We need some water, maybe some food, and I personally need some caffeine if we’re to keep driving like this forever. Gas wouldn’t hurt either.”
Lorie gave Jane her order and stayed with Sven while Jane rummaged in the convenience store. Pacing around the car, Lorie almost felt safe. It really did seem that the zombies were gone.
Jane came back and loaded the car with candy bars, and bottles of water and iced tea.
After a short leg-stretching break, they set off again, putting more distance between them and the Wegmans.
Lorie was munching on a Mounds Dark Chocolate candy bar when she saw them—a small throng of zombies coming up a side road toward 29. The throng reacted violently to the car’s presence, and though Lorie suspected that Jane saw them too, Lorie didn’t say a word.
Trying to work up the saliva with which to swallow her bite of coconut and chocolate goodness, Lorie tried to make peace with the truth. The outbreak wasn’t over. It would never be over.
Chapter 120
Sven let himself fade in and out of consc
iousness as Jane drove and Lorie navigated. He couldn’t believe it was down to the three of them now. It had just been seven, counting Milt.
He realized that he was neglecting to count Ivan.
Good, faithful Ivan, scratching at the bottom of the seat. Ivan would always be there, Ivan would always…
There was a shaking, a pain in his chest, blood in the trees—
He opened his eyes.
The car wasn’t moving. Was he in the car? Yes, still in the car, he could feel the strap of the seatbelt holding him uncomfortably in place.
Lorie was shaking him awake. “You need to eat.” Her eyes were kind, concerned.
Sven shook his head, feeling his throat seize and lock up.
“Sven,” she pleaded.
Abruptly, Sven jolted awake. “Why are we stopped? Where’s Jane?”
Lorie began to answer something about ABC Stores, but Sven didn’t catch the rest of it. He opened his door just in time, and fell out of the car to heave.
The heaving sapped the last of his strength, his will.
“Where are the…” he managed.
“Far behind us, far—”
When Sven next came to, they were stopped again. He heard voices—whispering voices. He opened his eyes.
Ivan was looking down disconsolately at him, intermittently poking at Sven’s head with a concerned paw.
Where were the voices coming from?
Whose voices?
Sven looked around, bleary-eyed, wondering if Ivan had been fed.
His field of vision lurched, and began to spin.
He rolled over and gave in to the vomiting. His body became one large spasm of expulsion. But nothing came out. What he needed most to get rid of could not be thrown off.
The darkness was there, drilling its way into his bones, and Sven knew that it would never leave.
When his vision cleared, Sven’s mouth was filled with a thick liquid. He was sure that it was blood.
I’m a zombie now too, he thought, that’s what’s happened. Just swallow it and shamble on. Come on zombie Sven, come o—
Sven’s vision cleared. Lorie and Jane were crouched over him, pouring water into his mouth.
He managed to swallow some of the vile liquid between bouts of coughing. Then his vision clouded again, and he was swimming in nausea.