CHAPTER 35

The cop was out in front, the zombie in the blue dress right behind him. Jeff grabbed the knife and staggered slowly to his feet. The world was swirling around him in a blur of faces and noise. He swayed drunkenly, unable to control his balance. A beer bottle smacked into the side of his head and caused him to rock back on his heels. A moment later, his arms were pinwheeling out of control as he fell back into the barbed wire.

A hand shoved him roughly back toward the center of the gazebo.

“Get in there and fight, you pussy!”

The floor was undulating beneath him. He stood there watching the approaching zombies, his shoulders slumped, his mouth hanging slack. His hands felt like they weighed a ton.

The cop was on him, but his hands were still handcuffed behind his back and all he could do was snap at Jeff with his teeth.

Jeff stepped to the side and pushed the cop to the wall, where he fell in a clumsy heap.

The zombie in the blue dress stepped around the fallen cop and reached for Jeff. Her right hand looked like it had been broken at some point after she turned, and the fingers hung uselessly from the hand like locks of hair. The top of her dress was torn away and hung about her waist, her white bra almost black with blood.

Jeff kicked at her and managed to land a blow right behind her knee that sent her to the ground. She grunted as she fell, but showed no signs of pain.

By the time she rose to her feet again, Jeff was scrambling for the cop. He was leaning against the barbed wire and couldn’t get back up without his hands. Jeff came up behind him and slammed the knife down into the side of his head with a wet-sounding smack.

The cop stopped moving almost immediately. Jeff still had his hand on the knife. He looked down at the blood seeping around the submerged blade and for a horrible moment he thought he could actually hear it pumping out of the wound. Everything fell away but that sound. Jeff was lost in it, shocked and thrilled and terrified by what he had just done.

The zombie in the blue dress put her ruined hand on his arm and she felt cold.

He yanked his arm back and rolled away from her. She came after him, but the sound of the blood pumping out of the cop’s wound had done something to him, energized him. He could feel the drugs surging through him now. He jumped to his feet, ran around the zombie, and grabbed the hilt of the knife sticking from the side of the cop’s head.

He pulled at the knife, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Come on, damn it. Come on.”

He was straining with everything he had, but the knife still wouldn’t come loose.

A hand came through the barbed wire and shoved him away from the corpse. Jeff batted the hand away. Through the screen of wire, he could see one of the bikers laughing at him, taunting him. But Jeff couldn’t hear him. The man’s mouth was moving, his eyes bulging with drunken excitement, flecks of white spit flying off his lips, but there was no noise.

Behind Jeff, the zombie in the blue dress was groping for him.

He turned. He was trapped between her and the corpse and the wall of barbed wire. The biker was still shoving him back away from the wall. Jeff grabbed the man’s hand and pulled it inside the gazebo with him as the zombie in the blue dress brought her teeth down on the spot where Jeff’s shoulder had just been.

She got a mouthful of the biker’s wrist instead.

The man screamed, and the zombie, now focused on the man, slid off Jeff’s shoulder.

Jeff stood up just as the man managed to free himself. The zombie tried to force her head through the barbed wire, but somebody kicked her in the face and knocked her backward into the gazebo.

Jeff’s chest was heaving. He looked down at the zombie and knew he had to do something. Then his gaze fell on the bra across her back. The clasp was coming loose, held together now by a single hook. Before she had a chance to stand, he reached down and pulled the bra apart. She was struggling to stand up, and as she moved, he managed to get one strap of the bra free from her arm and pull it up sharply, looping it around her neck until it formed a tight garrote. He put his knee in her back and pushed her facedown onto the wooden floor and he held her that way until she stopped squirming. The muscles in his arms were screaming at him by the time he let go of the bra and stood up.

The air was full of shouting. The gazebo was spinning, the faces leering in at him were distorted, alien, and frightening.

Then Gaines was standing in the gazebo with him.

“Harvard,” he said. “Holy shit, man. That was awesome. Come on.”

Gaines pulled him out of the gazebo and into a roaring crowd. Men were pushing him, congratulating him, slapping him on the back.

The crowd zippered open in front of him. On the ground, looking pale and frightened and angry, was the man who’d been bit by the zombie in the blue dress. He was on his knees, his face wet with sweat, his arms covered in blood. His lips were trembling.

“Here you go,” Gaines said.

Once again Jeff felt something forced into his hand.

He looked down and saw a gun. He turned to Gaines, his expression one of complete confusion.

“Kill him,” Gaines said. “Ain’t got no choice. He’s gonna turn.”

The man on the ground tried to protest, but the others held him down.

“Do it,” Gaines said.

Jeff looked at the gun, then at Gaines. The crowd was shouting for him to do it. Jeff let his gaze sweep over their faces, and in the crowd he found Colin. Colin was a wreck, his eyes puffy with crying, and it occurred to him then that Colin was deathly afraid of the zombies. Everybody was afraid of zombies, but Colin was out of his head with fear. Jeff suddenly felt a rush of sympathy for him. And he understood why Colin had reacted the way he did back in Barstow. It made sense to him now.

“Come on, Harvard. We’re waiting.”

Jeff turned back to Gaines. “I don’t want to.”

“You started this, Harvard. Now you got to finish it.”

Jeff looked at the gun again. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t. That’s the thing about liberty, Gaines. Give it to a man, you never know what he’s going to do with it. That’s what you meant by anarchy, isn’t it?”

He raised the gun to Gaines’s face and pulled the trigger.

The hammer fell with a click, but there was no shot.

Gaines laughed at him.

Jeff pulled the trigger again, and again, but nothing happened.

Gaines reached out and took the gun from him.

“It’s empty, Harvard. I ain’t got no college degree, but I ain’t a fool. I just like to see my message getting through to a new generation.”

He holstered the gun in the waistband of his jeans and motioned to the others. Jeff stepped to one side as the bikers lifted their injured comrade from the grass and threw him into the gazebo with the two corpses.

“Keep an eye on him,” Gaines said. “As soon as he turns, throw that one in.” He motioned at Colin. “That little pussy’s been whimpering the whole time. Let’s see how he does.”

Colin let out a feeble, sickening cry.

Men pushed their way past Jeff as the bikers moved into position along the walls of the gazebo. Inside, the injured man was pleading with the others to help him, but all he got was a pelting of beer cans.

Jeff staggered toward Colin. He was guarded by three bikers, but as Jeff got close, two others stepped in front of him and held him back.

“Colin,” Jeff said.

He was about to tell him he knew what had happened back in Barstow. Somehow, it felt absolutely critical that he say his piece, that he told Colin he understood and didn’t blame him for it, that it wasn’t his fault.

But he never had the chance.

From somewhere behind him there was the sound of an explosion.

Jeff turned and saw a fireball rising into the darkening sky. A pickup truck was on fire, and men were rolling in the street next to it. Some of them were on fire.

A figure was running from the burning truck toward the bus.

Jeff squinted, and all at once he realized it was Robin. She ran for the bus, and he expected her to keep running, but she stopped at the door and took something from Katrina.

It was a bottle of Grey Goose with a rag hanging from the neck. Even from a distance, Jeff could see her lighting the rag on fire and he thought, My God. A Molotov cocktail. Robin, you crazy, wonderful, beautiful woman.

She threw the burning bottle at a crowd of men who had advanced on the bus and it exploded at their feet. Two men caught the main part of the splash of broken glass and burning alcohol, and they caught fire instantly. One of the men ran a few steps, fell, and rolled in the street, trying to put out the flames. The other was beating at his pant legs as he staggered toward the curb. Their screaming filled the square.

Robin threw another burning bottle, then slipped inside the bus with Katrina just as the rest of the bikers seemed to grasp what was happening. Like a wave, they ran for the bus.

One of the men guarding Jeff ran with them. Jeff wanted to throw a punch at the man holding him by the shoulder, but that tingling feeling was spreading down his arms again, and it felt like his hands were a million miles away. The world was moving around him in slow motion.

But he wasn’t frozen. He recognized the opportunity and threw an elbow into the crotch of the guard standing next to him.

The man doubled over with a gut-clearing rush of air, but before his partner could move in to help, Jeff scooped up the fallen guard’s gun from the ground, turned, and put a round into the second guard’s face.

The sound of the gunshot was lost in the larger roll of gunfire that had erupted at the bus. The bikers had tried to force their way into the door and found it jammed with something. Frustrated there, they had taken to shooting the vehicle with their shotguns and their pistols, and already a thick cloud of smoke was drifting into the square from that direction.

Jeff was lost in the swirl of noise and movement. It was all happening so fast. Somewhere in the back of his head, he thought to himself that this was battle; he was in the midst of a battle. He saw men running, saw their faces distorted into howling masks of teeth and bulging eyes and rippling veins, and it just seemed so insane, so useless.

One of the bikers fired at him. Jeff dropped to a crouch and ran around the gazebo to the cattle truck where the bikers had locked up most of the zombies they’d captured. He scrambled up the ramp, pulled the truck’s back doors open, and jumped down into the grass. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a flash of blood-soaked, rotting faces leering out from inside the truck.

He got to his feet and ran.

Colin was leaning against the gazebo, his face fear stricken. A man with a huge black wound on the side of his face was staggering toward him, his hands outstretched, his eyes milky and vacant.

“Colin,” he shouted. “Come on. Move it.”

But Colin couldn’t move. His will was gone. He just stood there staring at the shambling wreck moving closer. Jeff ran for him. He shoved the zombie and knocked him to the ground, then grabbed Colin by the front of his oxford shirt and pulled him away from the gazebo. There was a black Chevy truck, one of the ones that had guided them into town, parked along the curb on the opposite side of the street, and they ran for it. No one bothered to stop them. Those who weren’t shooting up the bus had seen the advancing zombies and were rushing that way to fight them.

Gunfire rolled through the square. Men were running in every direction. Some were injured and screaming for help. Others were hollering for more ammunition. A few had taken off between the buildings and were running north into the residential part of town.

Jeff managed to get Colin into the cab of the truck and then climbed in after him. The keys were in the ignition, and Jeff thanked God for at least that one small mercy. The truck started up the first time, and Jeff wrestled with the stick shift to get it into gear. His little Honda Accord back home was a stick, but the truck was a more cantankerous vehicle and he had to grind the gears before it finally seated into first.

They started off with a lurch. The wheel was big and hard to control. Plus, Jeff was starting to hallucinate, and the road ahead looked like a writhing carpet of ants where men ran like lunatics through a fog of gun smoke.

But the truck picked up speed. Twenty miles an hour. Thirty.

Beside him, Colin braced against the door. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Keep your head down,” Jeff ordered.

He braced himself for impact. The knot of bikers ahead of them was thick, all of them shooting into the sides of the bus. Jeff pointed the truck into the heart of the crowd and mashed down on the gas.

A few of the men turned and saw them coming and managed to jump out of the way, but most never even saw it coming. The truck hit the crowd and it was like suddenly driving off-road as the bodies got sucked down under the front of the truck, the engine straining furiously against the sudden resistance. The wheel turned in Jeff’s hand and the truck started to drift sideways. Jeff struggled to regain control but the vehicle was already spinning. They hit the rear of the bus and glanced off, the back end of the truck racing to get ahead of the front as they spun completely out of control.

The truck slid to a stop with the hood pointed back in the direction they had come from. Bikers were looking at them in shock. Men were on the ground, some dead, some still moving.

The windshield exploded, and glass rained down into Jeff’s face and into his lap.

The bikers were shooting at them now.

Jeff got the truck back into gear, popped the clutch, and peeled out, heading right back into the crowd.

This time they were ready for it, and all but two of the bikers were able to get out of the way. Jeff didn’t give them a chance to get organized, though. He backed the truck up and hit a biker who was running for the cover of a parked car. Then he pulled forward and drove down another one who was running for the sidewalk.

At the same time, the zombies from the gazebo were entering the street. A few of the bikers had run that way and straight into the arms of the infected.

Their fighting line was broken. Even in his drugged state, Jeff could see most of the remaining bikers were running for the shelter of nearby buildings. He used the confusion to back the truck into the front bumper of the bus.

To Colin, he said, “Go inside and get the girls.”

“What?”

“Break out the windshield and get the girls. Hurry, Colin.”

Then Jeff climbed out and scanned the bodies on the ground. A few of them had dropped their weapons in the street, and he ran over and picked up a pistol. A bullet hit the pavement next to him and sent up a tiny umbrella of powdered rock and dust, but he couldn’t see where the shot had come from.

He turned to Colin and yelled, “Move it, Colin. Hurry.”

Colin climbed into the bed of the truck and then through the broken windshield. Jeff could hear him yelling inside. A shot whizzed past his head and this time he could trace it. Gaines was across the street, surrounded by zombies. His men were fighting them, but Gaines was ignoring them, focusing his shots in Jeff’s direction instead.

Jeff fired back at him, but missed. It was hard to hold the gun steady. Aiming was impossible. The front sight kept floating off the gun.

“Jeff!”

He turned and saw Colin and the girls climbing through the windshield. Colin was carrying Kyra in his arms like she was a child. Robin had an arm around Katrina’s waist and looked like she was supporting most of her weight.

Jeff ran to help them. Colin handed Kyra down to him and Jeff took her weight. Then Colin was beside him, taking Kyra back into his arms. The girl was like a rag doll, no resistance. She could barely hold her head up.

“Is she okay?” Jeff asked. He had to yell to be heard over the gunshots and the screams that were filling the square.

“Unconscious,” Colin said. “I don’t see any wounds.”

“Where are Sarah and Tara?”

“Dead,” Colin said.

“What?”

“Shot. Both of them.”

Colin steadied Kyra in his arms, then carried her to the passenger seat and helped her inside.

“Jeff!” It was Robin, calling to him from inside the bus. “Behind you.”

A man in denim coveralls, his white, chest-length beard crusted and stiff with dried blood, was staggering along the length of the truck. Jeff pulled the revolver from his waist and fired point-blank at the man, hitting him in the chest right below the nape of his throat.

The man fell back against the truck and coughed and gagged, but he didn’t go down.

Jeff took aim again, sighting the weapon this time squarely on the man’s forehead, and fired. The bullet hit its mark with a loud, wet smack, like a raw steak slapped on the kitchen counter. The man’s head jerked back and he tumbled to the street in a motionless heap.

Jeff looked over to the square and tried to find Gaines in the throng of bikers fighting with the zombies, but he couldn’t make him out.

He turned back to Robin and took Katrina from her.

“Careful,” Robin said. “Her stomach.”

The inside of Katrina’s shirt was soaked with blood. He could feel it as soon as he touched her. She groaned with the pressure of his hands on her midsection, but she didn’t cry out. In shock, probably, he thought.

Her head lolled onto his shoulder and he could hear her breathing, a wet, raspy sound mixed with whimpers of pain.

“Easy,” he said. “I got you.”

“Here,” Robin said, jumping down into the bed of the truck beside him. “I’ll take her.”

Robin put her arms around Katrina and slowly lowered her down to the bed. She turned so her back was against the cab wall and pulled Katrina into her lap, cradling her as best she could.

“Get us out of here, Jeff,” she said.

Jeff jumped out of the bed and climbed behind the wheel.

“Everybody hold on,” he yelled.

He got the truck in gear and mashed down on the gas. The back tires chirped on the asphalt and the truck leaped forward. In front of them was a knot of people, both bikers and infected. Those bikers lucky enough to find an opening through the infected were running for their lives, while others not so lucky had resorted to hand-to-hand fighting, using anything they could to fend off the zombies.

Jeff scanned the crowd as they accelerated, looking for Gaines. He saw him running toward the street from the gazebo, on an intercept course with Jeff and the others.

Jeff jogged the wheel to the right and went up on the curb. He was aiming right for Gaines, mowing down bikers and zombies alike when they couldn’t get out of the way.

Gaines stopped running and pulled his pistol.

He took slow, measured aim at the approaching truck and fired.

The rear windshield behind Jeff’s head exploded, and Jeff instinctively veered to his left. More bodies disappeared beneath the front of the truck and the vehicle bounced over them before landing back in the street and straightening out.

As they sped away, Jeff looked back at Gaines. Gaines was standing in the middle of the crowd, zombies all around him, though he didn’t give them even a passing glance. Instead, he leveled his pistol again and fired at the truck.

Robin screamed.

Jeff immediately hit the brakes and looked back. Robin’s face was splattered with blood. Beside her, Katrina’s head was blasted open on one side, a yellowish-gray mass of tissue visible through the huge hole in her skull.

Another shot hit the roof next to Jeff’s face.

Colin said, “Go, go, go!”

Jeff took one last look behind him, saw Gaines standing there with the gun in his hand, and stepped on the gas.

Three hours later, Jeff pulled to the side of the road. Colin was still holding Kyra as tightly as ever, and Jeff wasn’t sure who was comforting whom. But he couldn’t drive anymore. The acid was coursing through him stronger than ever, and the road was moving like a living thing. He got out of the truck and went to the back. Robin was still there, holding Katrina in her arms, stroking the corpse’s blood-matted hair. She hadn’t wiped the blood from her own face, and when she rolled her eyes in Jeff’s direction, the whites stood out in stark contrast to the rest of her face.

“We should bury her,” he said.

Robin pulled Katrina closer to her and stared at him.

“I can do it,” he said. “If you want me to.”

“No,” she said. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “No, I’ll help.”

Together, working silently, they lowered Katrina’s body from the truck, took a shovel from behind the driver’s seat, and headed off into the brush. They followed a trail to the top of a small rise and stood, side by side, looking down over a desert landscape silvered with moonlight.

“Do you like this place?” he asked.

She nodded. He could hear her sniffling.

Two hours later, the grave was finished. It wasn’t deep, but it would do.

Jeff took off his shoelaces and used them to lash two sticks together into a cross. Then he hammered it into the ground at the head of the grave and stepped back.

Robin muttered, “I love you, baby,” and knelt forward and kissed the cross.

Then she took Jeff’s hand and together they walked back to the truck.

Colin and Kyra were waiting there, standing outside the truck. Colin turned when he heard them coming down from the trail and he motioned them over.

He was staring up at a green highway sign that announced the Guadalupe Mountains National Park thirty miles ahead. Somebody had written over the sign in white paint.

WE ARE GOING TO THE CEDAR RIVERS

NATIONAL GRASSLANDS NORTH DAKOTA

JOIN US

“What do you think?” Colin said.

He turned to the others. Jeff turned away from the sign. Something about those letters, the strong, confident brushstrokes, tugged at him. Finding them out here in the middle of nowhere, and at a point when he stopped because he couldn’t make himself drive any farther—it felt like some kind of sign. A shot in the arm when they needed it most. Like it was meant to be. He raised an eyebrow at Robin.

She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and nodded.

And just like that, it was decided.

“Let’s find a map,” Jeff said.