Hopefully.
Ten seconds later, and the damn thing was still there, under the trailer, looking through the hole.
Had it smelled something? Seen something? Sensed something?
They weren’t stupid. Turning hadn’t robbed them of their intelligence, even if it had reverted them to an almost primal, animalistic state of being.
And animals could sometimes sense their prey…
Will inched his forefinger toward the safety switch of the Remington and was about to slide it into firing position when the black eyes on the other side of the breathing hole disappeared.
He had started to relax when he heard footsteps on the roof above him again, and this time they didn’t disappear right away like before. These new sounds were lingering.
Will flicked the safety off the Remington, mindful of the soft click it made, such a minor noise sounding like an explosion in the stillness.
They were still up there, moving around lazily. What the hell were they doing up there? He fought back the urge to start firing with the Remington. He could probably pick them all off with a few choice blasts from down here.
Tempting…
When he looked back down at the breathing hole, the black eyes were back.
Will didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.
Go away, you sonofabitch. Shoo.
After about thirty seconds, the searching eyes obeyed and disappeared again, replaced by dark asphalt in the background.
A moment later, the footsteps above him also vanished.
Will waited, wondering if this was some kind of feint.
Dead, not stupid.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
Thirty…
And still just asphalt below him through the hole, and no hints of a tremor above him on the roof.
Will allowed himself to breathe again and lessened his grip on the shotgun after flicking the safety back on. He slowly lowered the weapon down to the mattress next to him, still within easy reach.
After a while, the ghouls must have been convinced the semitrailer lot was clear, because there was a loud flurry of movement, fading away from them…
…and then silence.
He relaxed a bit.
Lara had gone to sleep next to him. He could also hear the teenagers snoring lightly in the back. Or maybe it was just one of them. It was hard to tell.
He sat awake and waited, listening, trying to feel the slightest vibrations from outside. Soft wind against the steel walls of the containers, debris blowing across the concrete parking lot. What may or may not have been a car horn in the distance, or possibly just his imagination playing tricks on him.
He lost the battle to stay awake around three in the morning, and was surprised he didn’t dream of Kate again.
CHAPTER 19
BLAINE
They hadn’t been in a city as big as Beaumont since they had abandoned Dallas, so it felt a little odd to be driving up a highway that was suddenly stuffed with cars, giving him flashbacks of afternoon rush-hour traffic. Except there were no horns, no fumes, and none of the grinding sounds of machinery inching forward every few seconds.
There were vehicles in their path when they approached the outskirts of the city, but it only got worse as they continued on. Whenever the highway seemed to thin out and become passable, another huge block of cars appeared to prove him wrong.
After a while, Sandra began stopping more than she was moving. Finally, she simply stopped and parked next to an overturned Ford truck and a red Camaro buried in its exposed belly.
She sat back, then let out a frustrated sigh. “It’s not going to get any better, is it?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” Blaine said. “Want me to drive?”
“You can’t even walk.”
“I can walk fine.”
“Oh yeah? Get out and show me.”
“Not now, it’s too hot outside.”
“Right.” Then she smiled at him. “Besides, I like this. Driving you around. It’s liberating. I just wish the damn road would cooperate.”
Blaine wondered if Will and the others had encountered the same thing and how they got around it. You could go around the city, but that would add a lot of time to the schedule. Maybe even a day. No. Sticking to the highway, or near it, was the shortest route.
“What time is it?” Sandra asked.
He glanced down at his watch. “Three fourteen.”
They had made pretty good time since Lancing. The highways between towns and cities were always easy to travel, and it wasn’t until you hit the towns that things got complicated.
“Look,” Sandra said, pointing.
Blaine looked at where she was pointing, saw a Burger King to their right, in front of a big sprawling group of buildings. A mall, with a Sortys department store taking up most of the space on this side of the structure. The parking lot was almost entirely empty.
He searched out a sign and found one near the street that read: “Willowstone Mall.”
“Is this really the time to go shopping?” Blaine said.
She rolled her eyes. “No, not the mall. In front of it.”
She pointed again, and following her a second time, he saw a Cavender’s Boot City store near the feeder road. It was in front of the mall and squeezed between a Best Buy and a Petsmart. Cavender’s sold cowboy boots and hats and general Western wear. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place he visited regularly.
“I need new boots,” Sandra said. “This pair’s getting a little worn around the heels.”
He looked down at his own sneakers. They were dirty and worn around the edges. They were blue once, but were mostly white now, the colors faded from heavy use.
“Let’s go shopping,” he said.
They pulled into the Cavender’s and parked between a beat-up brown Toyota truck and a white Ford F-150. The storefront windows were intact, and there was enough sunlight that he could see racks of jeans, boots, hats, and belt buckles. There were a lot of belt buckles.
Yee haw.
The second he climbed out of the Silverado, Blaine flinched with pain. He stopped for a second and looked down, expecting to see blood on his shirt, and was relieved when he didn’t. Still, there was no mistaking where the pain was coming from. He felt like sitting down to catch his breath, but Sandra might be watching, so he forced himself forward, toward the front door of the Cavender’s instead.
“You think any of those jeans will fit me?” he asked.
He was at the doors, reaching for the handle, when he stopped. He saw Sandra’s reflection in the store’s glass door, and she wasn’t alone.
Sandra stood frozen next to the truck, with some kind of alien standing behind her. No, not an alien. It was a man wearing some type of black gas mask, with a large, elongated clear lens and two small breathing filters jutting out from the sides like shorn tusks. He was wearing some kind of gray hazmat suit. Not the big, bulky kind, but the thin, tactical types he had seen soldiers wearing on the news. The suit was light enough for the man to wear a gun belt with a holster. The Browning automatic that should have been in the holster was instead pressed up against Sandra’s temple.
Blaine spun, drawing his Glock. The sudden, quick movement made him grimace as pain shot through him like some pissed-off demon from Hell. He pushed away the pain and concentrated on taking aim at the man standing behind Sandra instead. He couldn’t see the face clearly through the gas mask, but he could see dark, small black eyes. The man was at least half a foot shorter than Sandra, and the sight of him holding her at gunpoint struck Blaine as absurd.