“Why’d you do that?” she shouts.
He doesn’t react. She glances around, making sure his girlfriend can’t spring any more horror-movie shock-entrances on her, maybe popping out of a garbage can this time since there are no doors nearby.
“Stop following us, okay? Leave us alone!”
A sound gurgles in his throat and passes through his lips. It’s faint and he’s far away, but this time she’s sure it was a word.
“Did you hear him?” she asks Addis. “Did he just say something?”
Addis is squinting at the man, a queer expression on his face. “I think he said ‘please.’”
“What the f**k…” Nora mutters.
Out from behind the fountain, the man’s girlfriend staggers into view, still visibly female but hard to call a woman anymore. Its shoulders are now bare bone with nearly e w I watransparent scraps of skin dangling off. Its internal organs have shrunk away from the bullet wounds in its chest; Nora can see the lovely sunset shining through the holes. Since she last encountered this creature just a few hours ago, its decay has advanced about a month.
“Leave us alone!” she screams, and drags Addis away from the park, her fingers white-knuckled on his wrist.
“Q!”
“Where?”
“Right there. Food next exit…Quiznos.”
“Oh come on!”
“Stick that in your sandwich hole.”
“I hate you, Mom.”
Julie and her mother are playing the Alphabet Game. It is significantly harder without any passing license plates to read. They haven’t seen another car on the road since Idaho, and that one rammed them into the median and disgorged two men who thought they’d found a nice little family to rob. That game of Alphabet ended with Julie and her mother wiping blood off the Tahoe’s beige leather upholstery. She hopes this one will end with her being the first to spot the Seattle Zoo.
As always, she awoke to the hum of the tires and the seatbelt cutting into her neck. Her father gets up at an hour that’s only technically morning and usually has them on the road well before sunrise. She has always wanted to witness his mysterious morning routine but has never managed to wake up for it. She imagines him perusing back-issues of the New York Times and sipping a cup of instant coffee while field-stripping the family shotguns.
“How close are we to Seattle?” she asks him.
“Coming up on Burlington, so about two hours more unless the road clears up.”
The freeway has been getting progressively rougher since Bellingham. Huge potholes, scattered debris, and the occasional scorched wreck of a vehicle, either blown up in a crash or set ablaze by the Fire Church. Their speed has been dropping steadily as they weave through the mess.
“What’s the Almanac say about Burlington? Exed, right?”
“Last month’s said there were still a few communes and markets functioning. Small towns last longer than cities sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Not enough resources to attract militias and not enough Living to attract the Dead. If they’re small enough, they get left alone.”
“Why don’t we live in a small town then?”
He looks over at his wife and smiles slightly. “Audrey?”
“Your dad thinks we should,” she sighs. “What do you think, Julie? Should we move to a place that’s too boring for zombies?”
“There are worse things than boredom,” her husband counters.
“I’m not convinced of that.”
“After what we’ve—”
He slams on the brakes; Julie’s face smacks into the front seat as the Tahoe screeches to a stop. Stunned, she feels her nose to see if it’s bleeding, then reluctantly follows her parents’ gaze.
They have just crested a hill, and directly in front of them is a police tire-shredding chain. In front of the chain is a wall of wrecked cars that extends across all eight lanes of the freeway. And beyond the wall, stretching across a wide, green valley of fertile farm fields, ise w If the cha what appears to be a war zone. What was once a shopping district has been reduced to an endless plain of pockmarked asphalt. The gutted, scorched interiors of big box retailers are visible through gaping holes in their walls. The only vehicles in the parking lots are tanks, some with their turrets blown off, some lying on their sides, treads hanging out like entrails; some marked Army, some spray-painted with the logos of various militias. And behind all this, as a perfectly hellish backdrop: the concrete skeletons of buildings engulfed in yellow flames of Fire Church phosphorous, left to burn for days as a warning. A monument. Or whatever their muddled message may be.
“Why?” Julie asks in a very small voice. There is of course no answer.
Her father grabs his shotgun and steps out of the truck, slipping into the hyper-alert posture of a soldier on perimeter check. Julie can’t see anything moving down in the valley; it could have been deserted weeks ago and set ablaze more recently by a few passing Churchers for morning devotional. She is hoping it’s as empty as it looks.
“John,” her mother calls to her father’s back. “Let’s just go around. We can take the back roads till I-5 clears up.”
He doesn’t answer. Julie can see in the set of his jaw and the animal blankness in his eyes that he didn’t even hear her. He’s in procedure mode. He will scout the area and ascertain possible threats before making any further decisions.
“John!”
He climbs into the bed of a pickup and pulls out his scope, begins scanning the smoldering valley below. Julie’s mother sighs and grabs her gun. “Stay here,” she tells Julie, locking the doors as she climbs out.