Great, Steve thought, unable to resist the urge to turn his head to look back at Erik. Now one of us is sick. What the hell are we supposed to do if something goes wrong?
“Get some more quilts,” Steve said, looking down at the impressive load already before him. “We need to fix that backseat up. He’s going to be miserable without it.”
“He asleep?” Steve asked.
“I dunno,” Ian said. “I’d move the curtain to check on him, but I don’t think that’s the best idea.”
Steve reached up, adjusted the blanket across his shoulders and accelerated his pace, taking care not to clip any cars that happened to line the road. He didn’t think a fender-bender would do much to the SUV, much less keep them from moving, but he didn’t want to risk hitting anything with Erik lying unbuckled in the backseat.
“You ok?” Ian asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“You looked like you were thinking pretty hard about something.”
“I was thinking about not hitting the cars in front of us,” Steve replied. “It won’t do much to the truck, but Erik isn’t buckled in.”
“Best not to hit anything if you can help it,” Ian agreed. “Relax. You’re doing a good job. Better job than I probably could.”
Steve maneuvered the vehicle around a pileup of cars and continued down the road toward where he knew the road split into a Y that led to the interstate they’d just left last night. This particular passage didn’t put him at ease. Though he knew they would soon be safe, he dreaded the amount of metal they’d have to drive over. The rain had shifted most of it off the road, but some of it remained strewn across the path, metal snakes and barbed cone shells just waiting to be run over.
You can do this, he thought. You can.
Something stumbled out from behind a broken car, and Steve rolled to a stop.
“Just hit it,” Ian said. “It’s a fuckin’ zombie.”
“No,” Steve said. “Look at it. This one is…different.”
The black-skinned entity before them lifted its head and acknowledged them with a simple tilt of the head. Seemingly gauging them, it straightened itself into an upright position, then tilted its head in the opposite direction, like a child trying to see something from every possible angle. Throughout this entire process, it remained standing in the road, content with the distance between them.
“See?” Steve asked.
“What the fuck’s it doing?”
“What’s what doing?” Erik groaned from the back seat.
“There’s something in the road in front of us,” Steve said. “It’s not a zombie.”
“Then what the fuck is it?”
“Look for yourself.”
A hand stabbed through the curtains and parted them. Erik’s head appeared soon after, face contorting in pain at the light that stabbed through the window. “I can’t see anything.”
“Give your eyes a second to adjust.”
Erik blinked. “What the hell?”
“That’s what I was saying,” Ian said. “You think it’s a person?”
“No. If it were a person, it’d already be down the road and by the truck by now.”
The creature tilted its head back into its regular position. It took one look to its right, then its left, then back over its shoulder before it began to make its way down the road. Stumbling, but not completely awkward in its movements, it coasted the wreckage in the street and regarded the metal on the road. Once, it even bent forward to remove it from its path, holding the piece of metal like a delicate artifact before tossing it into the bushes.
“What the hell is going on?” Erik whispered.
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “What am I supposed to do?”
“It’s heading right for us,” Ian said. “It’s not taking its time either.”
At the rate the creature was moving, it would be upon them within minutes. That realization forced sweat from Steve’s face and made the hairs on his arms stand on end.
It’s not a zombie, he thought, coaxing himself to remain calm. It didn’t come straight for us when it heard us in the road.
“Here it comes,” Ian said.
Now no more than a few feet away from the vehicle, Steve could make out its features in gross detail. Its skin wrinkled like a raisin and darkened as though as though it had spent one too many hours in a tanning bed, it appeared to not be dead, but something completely unlike it. Steve would go so far as to say it was alive, but didn’t as its hand touched the hood of the vehicle and directed his attention toward its head. Its eyes—the original color now indeterminable—shined like black onyx under an intense fixture of light. They didn’t glow, but their boldness alone forced him to keep direct eye contact with it.
“It’s coming toward the window,” Erik said.
“I know,” Steve replied.
When the creature was directly at Steve’s side, it reached forward.
Steve swallowed a lump in his throat.
What’s it going to do?
It didn’t touch the window. Instead, it stopped, regarded him with a tilt of its head, then extended one single finger and tapped the glass with a long, purplish fingernail.
“Fuck,” Ian said, shocked. “It knows what’s it’s doing.”
“That’s obvious,” Erik said, “but what does it want?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said slowly. The creature tilted its head again. Its mouth seemed to replicate the action, as though disappointed, before it tapped the glass again, three times instead of just once. “I think it wants me to roll the window down.”
“Crack it,” Erik said. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
Reaching forward, Steve set his finger to the dash and pressed his finger to the button.
The window rolled down a crack. A gust of rain and the smell of fruit blew into the SUV.
Fruit?
“S-sir?” he managed, waiting for the thing to respond.
The thing brought its hand back and let it dangle at its side. It tilted its head again, this time obviously acknowledging Steve for the fact that he wasn’t an inanimate object, then shifted its lips. A purple tongue, still very much wet and free of rot, slicked its lips.
“Sir?” he asked again.
“Ruhh,” it gasped.
“What the fuck?” Erik said.
“It’s talking!” Ian gasped.
“What are you trying to say, sir?” Steve asked, heart firing in his chest.
“Ruh… ruh… run.”
“It’s telling us to fuckin’ run!” Erik yelled, clawing at Steve’s shoulder. “What the fuck are you waiting for?”
“They… ur… here.” It pointed.
A horde of zombies stumbled out from inside a building and turned their eyes on them.
“GO!” Erik cried. “GO!”
Steve slammed his foot on the ignition.
The SUV went soaring up the road.
In his haste to leave, he barely noticed that the thing had stopped to remove all of the metal on the road.
CHAPTER 10
They pulled into southeastern Idaho around three-thirty, despite the rain that followed them throughout the lower parts of Denver and Utah. A breath of fresh air at the tail end of October, they each breathed a sigh of relief as the air warmed and the sun came out to celebrate their joyous victory.
By the time evening began to crest the horizon, they pulled into the neighborhood Jamie had once called home.
“This is it,” Jamie said, coming to a stop outside a row of three houses.
Dakota looked on in awe at the sight of the three two-story, perfectly-restored country homes before him. Flanked by a long-dry field on one side and a road on another, each house looked toward the south, where an expanse of neighboring houses lay a few hundred feet in the distance. Here, poised almost at the tip of the range, he could just begin to make out snow forming on the jagged peaks of one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.