At that moment, those mutants—hundreds of them—engulfed us. Seeing their faces plastered to the glass was deeply disturbing. I assumed it was high-security glass, impossible to punch through. Still, I shuddered every time a fist hit the windshield. They saw us clearly, and that drove them crazy. They surged toward the vehicle with a hungry look in their dead eyes. The smell of urine filled the van. Someone had pissed himself in fear. Not a surprise. It was the most terrifying experience imaginable.
Purring softly, the van slowly penetrated the crowd until we were surrounded on all sides. We’d bet it all on that card, putting our trust in the weight and the armor of our vehicle-shelter. In there we were safe and secure. For a moment, I even felt a little confident.
The dense crowd plagued us from all sides. From time to time, we felt a jolt as we ran over one of those things that didn’t move fast enough or didn’t have room to get away and ended up under our wheels. It was gut-wrenching.
I noticed my vision was blurred. I rubbed my eyes and realized I’d teared up. I was crying out of sheer terror. We were going three or four miles an hour down the middle of a huge crowd of corpses in varying degrees of decay. They were all ages and all kinds. I saw middle-aged women, young men, the elderly, children…they were the most unsettling.
A girl about eight years old, with a dark stain on her torn Bratz T-shirt and a deep cut on her head, her dirty blonde hair plastered down with blood, stayed glued my window for about ten minutes. With one hand, she gripped the rearview mirror, and with the other she hit the window, moaning furiously. Up close like that, we got a good look at her dark mouth and her pale skin, riddled with dark, broken veins. After a while she started hitting her head against the glass. She seemed frustrated to be so close yet not able to reach me. At one point I heard the clack her teeth made against the armored window. God, I still shudder when I remember that moment.
ENTRY 63
March 10, 1:05 a.m.
I feel better, calmer. I want to leave a written record of every moment I’ve lived through, but some situations come back so strongly, it makes me nauseous. That half-hour ride in the van is one of them.
I was talking about the little girl. After ten minutes she let go. Maybe because she got tired (do these beings get tired?) or because a huge, muscular guy about thirty years old pulled her away. That bastard was right out of a nightmare. Half his body was burned and blistered from a fire. He was missing three fingers on the hand he pounded against the windshield as he clung to the hood with the other. With each blow, he let out an inhuman bellow. He hit the windshield with such fury that after a while his arm turned into a mass of red pulp that clouded the window. The bastard finally turned loose when the truck shook and squashed one of those things. Thinking about him made my hair stand on end long afterward.
Those are just two examples. I remember twenty or thirty more and could describe them perfectly, but I just can’t face it right now. It’s too scary. Hundreds of those creatures were all around us, shouting, wailing, and beating on every inch of surface of the van. The shouting outside contrasted sharply with the deathly silence inside the van, broken only by the monotonous, guttural whisper of the Pakistanis praying in Arabic. I was amused by the idea of praying to God when we were in hell, but I kept that thought to myself.
Kritzinev, his eyes bulging, clung to his flask like a drowning man with a life preserver. From time to time, he knocked back a long, deep gulp that made his Adam’s apple bob up and down. Pritchenko was pale and scared, but behind his huge blond mustache, he calmly studied the scene. I concluded he was the only guy in that van I could rely on if I wanted out alive.
All went well for about thirty minutes. Each time the vehicle threatened to go belly up, it put the fear of God in me. If the vehicle overturned, we’d be as good as dead. Either those mutants would kill us, or we’d die of hunger and thirst in the van, surrounded by an impassable crowd of undead. The best solution would be a shot to the head. Frankly I didn’t relish ending my life in a modern-day version of Numantia. At least in 133 BC those early Iberians were fighting noble enemies, the Romans, and not some freakish undead.
Occasionally the van rocked violently as several undead were crushed at once. More than once we nearly tipped over, but we managed to continue our slow, tortuous pace. Until we reached the tunnel.
It wasn’t really a tunnel, but a passageway under an intersection. I remembered driving through it on the way to a meeting. It was three hundred yards long and very narrow, with a lot of support beams. And black as midnight. I didn’t know what was inside. If it was blocked, I’d have to back out in the dark with that crowd around me. I’d probably crash into a beam, and we’d be stuck there forever with a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. I wouldn’t go in there even if Kritzinev held a gun to my chest.
So I told Pritchenko to translate that to Kritzinev. While Viktor talked, I watched the first officer’s reaction out of the corner of my eye. He shrugged and mumbled something in Russian, not taking his eyes off the crowd howling around us, pounding on the windows nonstop. Kritzinev was too out of it to make a decision. I gave the orders here. That made me feel more confident—maybe too confident.
If we didn’t drive through the tunnel, we’d have to use the overpass that was just two hundred yards away. The crowd had thinned out a little. For the last mile or so, we’d been able to speed up. We were driving on wider streets, dodging abandoned vehicles. That worked in our favor. Our pursuers had to maneuver around those obstacles. That slowed them down and gave us some time before they reached us. But they’d catch up with us in a few minutes.
We drove onto the overpass until we came to the middle of the bridge.
I braked hard. Across the middle of the road was a car crashed into some concrete blocks that had once been a roadblock. Some poor devil had driven too fast, fleeing God knows what, and been hurled into those blocks, wrecking his car. There were bloodstains around the chassis and the footprints of someone or something who’d splashed through puddles getting away from the car. If the guy had survived the accident, he soon suffered something truly horrible.
Kritzinev shook off his stupor when he discovered we weren’t surrounded by all those undead. He roared something to Viktor, who rushed to translate for me. “Ram that abandoned car,” that thug said. I shook my head. I told him he’d seen too many movies. It would destroy our van. He roared again, getting red in the face, spewing frothy saliva, screaming, choking. A drunk, scared, angry Ukrainian is a sight to see. That Ukrainian was calling me names that were anything but pretty. Viktor deftly edited out the worst parts and told me to change seats with Shafiq. He’d take the wheel.
I don’t make a habit of arguing with someone pointing a gun at my chest, so I gave my seat to Shafiq. In the process of switching seats in that narrow cabin, he and I got all tangled up. I ended up sitting in the middle seat of the van, with Shafiq on one side and Kritzinev on the other. I barely had time to turn around and tell Viktor to hold on tight, then turn back around. I fastened my seat belt just in time.
The Pakistani floored it and launched the three-ton van against the abandoned car, like a ram butting its head against a wall. I braced myself against the dashboard. The impact was terrible. I figured someone in back was thrown forward violently. There was a hard blow against the partition, followed by a long howl of pain.
I didn’t have time to find out what had happened. Putting the van in reverse, Shafiq disengaged from the wrecked car, which had moved about twenty inches to one side, and rammed it again. I held on tight as the heavy van lurched forward.