Every time the occupants of the van had to roll down a window, I stopped breathing, waiting for the screams to start. They never did. We were far enough outside the footprint of the storm that we were probably safe… but “probably” isn’t something I believe in banking on. Thank God for bug repellent.
With the road empty and both of us driving as fast as we dared, we cleared forty miles of highway driving in just under thirty minutes. From there, Becks led us onto a frontage road that paralleled I-5 but was mostly concealed by the concrete retaining wall meant to protect passing motorists. I guess if you were one of the people who lived in the tiny houses and aging trailer parks we passed, you were shit out of luck. That’s something almost everyone does their best to forget: The world may have changed, but some people still can’t afford to come in out of the cold. The poor didn’t have advanced security systems or hermetically sealed windows, and now that Kellis-Amberlee had found itself a new vector…
It didn’t really bear thinking about.
We were passing Ashland, Oregon, when my helmet beeped again. “Go,” I said.
“Shaun?” Becks sounded uncertain. “The GPS just gave me our final destination.”
“And?”
“And it’s Shady Cove.”
I managed to keep control of the bike, but only because I had George to take care of the vital business of swearing like a madwoman at the back of my head while I focused on the road. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” There was a long pause before she asked, “What are the odds that she’s driving us into a trap?”
“I don’t know. What are the odds that we have anywhere else to go?” She didn’t answer me. “I figured as much. We’re going to Shady Cove, Becks. Tell everybody to take off the safeties and keep their eyes on the mirrors.”
“I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Mason,” said Becks, and cut the connection.
“So do I,” I muttered. “So do I.”
A lot of small towns were declared uninhabitable after the Rising. They’re little dead zones scattered around the map of the world, places where no one goes anymore—no one but well-prepared, heavily armed Irwins looking for a story, and even then, we never go in at night. Going into a dead zone at night is like signing your own death warrant. Santa Cruz, California, is a dead zone. So is most of India. And so is Shady Cove, Oregon. It used to be a small but comfortable town of about two thousand people, surrounded by woodlands, comfortably close to the popular tourist attraction of several state and county parks. They did okay.
Until the zombies came, and the very things that made it such a nice place to live turned Shady Cove into a deathtrap. The same thing could have happened to Weed, if not for the fisheries, and Shady Cove didn’t have anything that vital to the local economy. It just had people. We lost a lot of people in the Rising. A town that size was barely even a blip in the statistics.
This is bad, said George. We need to turn back.
“This makes perfect sense. If Dr. Abbey is trying to go off the grid, a dead zone is the best place to do it, and Shady Cove was never burned.” I forced a smile. “Besides, you only know the place exists because of the number of times I begged you to let me go there.”
There’s a reason I always said no.
“I know. But it’s not like we’ve been left with a whole lot of options.”
George didn’t have an answer to that one.
The frontage roads gave way to smaller frontage roads, which gave way in turn to roads that were barely even paved. The lights of the freeway guard walls stayed in view the whole time, almost taunting me with the idea of smooth surfaces and well-marked exit signs. We were still within Dr. Abbey’s time frame, and the GPS was clearly still feeding Becks directions, because she kept driving and didn’t stop to yell at me for getting us into this mess.
When I drove past a sign reading SHADY COVE—5 MILES, I actually started to believe that we might reach our destination alive.
Then the first zombie came racing out of the woods on my left.
It was moving with the horrible, disjointed speed that only the freshly infected can manage. A normal human will always be faster in a short sprint, but the freshly infected win every time in a long race. They don’t care about pain, and they don’t really notice when their lungs stop pulling in enough air. The uninfected will eventually stop chasing you. A zombie will run until it collapses from exhaustion, and there’s a good chance that even that won’t keep it down for long.
The van swerved to avoid the zombie. I did the same. I was so busy trying to keep the bike upright that I didn’t see the other three infected lunging out of the shelter of the trees until one of them was scrabbling at the handlebar siy bike, with absolutely no awareness of the sheer stupidity of attacking a man on a moving motorcycle. “Holy—”
I slammed on the brakes, sending the zombie tumbling away from me. The van was back on track, moving away at top speed. I twisted the throttle, starting after them, only to come up short as an arm was hooked around my neck and I was jerked off the bike.
The Kevlar jacket I was wearing absorbed most of the impact with the road, but it couldn’t save me from the hands that were pulling me down, uncoordinated fingers trying to find an opening in my body armor. I smacked them away, flailing to get free. If I could get to my guns, either of them, I would stand a chance of getting away from this. Not a good chance, but a chance.
My questing fingers found the grip of a pistol. I yanked it from the holster hard enough to break one of the snaps and fired it into the face of the first zombie without pausing to aim. The report was loud enough to make my ears ring, even through the still-sealed helmet. The zombie fell back, leaving me with just enough leverage to push myself into a sitting position and shoot the zombie to my right. That left—crap. That left at least three, by a quick count, and all of them focused entirely on me. The bike was on its side up ahead. There was no way I’d be able to get it righted and running again unless I took all the zombies out, and the numbers were not on my side.
Don’t be an idiot. You’ve survived worse.
“Says you,” I muttered, and took another shot.
I was so focused on the zombies I could see that I forgot one of the first rules of dealing with any zombie mob larger than three: Remember that they’re smarter than you think they are. Surprisingly strong hands grabbed me from behind, jerking me back.
Maybe it was the fall I’d taken earlier, and maybe it was just a natural flaw in the construction of my body armor, but when the zombie pulled, I heard something tear. I whipped my head around, looking for a shot, and saw to my horror that the entire left sleeve of my jacket was ripped along the main seam, leaving my arm—protected only by a flannel shirt—exposed.
The infected who was holding me hissed, showing me his shattered, blackened teeth, and brought his head down as I brought my gun up. The bullet caught him in the crown of the head, blowing a jet of brain matter out onto the pavement. The zombie’s hands went limp, and he fell, a look of comic bewilderment on the remains of his face. More infected were coming out of the woods. For the moment, however, I wasn’t sure how much concern I could spare for them.