She grips her face in her hands, squeezing out all thought.
No.
Julie’s eyes open halfway. Morning sun refracts through the water in them, making abstract art in her lashes and salts. She has just woken from a long night of dreams, bad like they always are now. She dreamt she was a monster. She dreamt she was alone in an empty school. She dreamt a skeleton had stolen her mother’s white dress and was dancing on a roof with her father.
She feels a rumbling under her and realizes the truck is moving. She sits up and wipes the crust out of her eyes. The sun has the shy, tentative angle of early dawn.
“Mom?” she says, and her mother’s eyes appear in the mirror, blue like hers but paler.
“Hi, honey,” she says.
Julie stretches her limbs. “Where are we?”
“Just coming up on Seattle. See?”
They crest a hill and the city skyline sweeps into view. She sees the Space Needle, still pointing straight and true, lights blinking calmly like nothing is wrong. The freeway begins to congest as they get closer to downtown. A permanent traffic jam of derelict cars crashed or abandoned in the street. Julie’s father slows to weave through the mess, carefully bulldozing cars aside when necessary. Julie keeps her eyes on the sky to avoid seeing whatever is inside those cars. She feels too fragile to take in more death right now. She is already filled to the brim.
This upward gaze is why, as they approach an overpass, she notices a girl stumbling across it.
“Dad!” she shouts and points wildly. “Look!”
“Oh God…” her mother whispers.
Her father stops the truck but says nothing. They all watch the girl make her way toward the other side of the freeway. Slow, shuffling steps. Empty, dull-eyed stare. A blood-smeared hand with a missing finger swinging against her hip.
Julie’s father looks back at the road and drives forward.
“Dad!”
“She’s Dead.”
“We don’t know that,” his wife says.
“You saw how she’s walking. You saw her hand. Alone in an exed city without even a backpack? She’s Dead.”
“What if she’s just hurt?” Julie demands.
“It’s clearly a bite. If she’s hasn’t converted yet, she will in a few minutes.”
Julie cranes her neck to look back at the overpass. “Dad, we have to at least check!”
“What’s the point, Julie?” For the first time this morning his eyes appear in the mirror, and Julie glimpses pain in them. “Do you want to make another new friend just to watch her become a corpse? Are you going to shoot her or will I have to?”
Julie’s eyes sting and her mouth trembles. She looks at the girl, older than her, older than the boy she killed yesterday, maybe closer to Nikki’s age, walking alone on a bridge.
She opens the truck’s door and jumps out.
The truck is not moving fast but the pavement sweeps her feet out from under her and she falls, land s he opens tnds on her elbows and then her mouth, feels a few teeth loosen. Heedless of the salty flood pouring down her throat, she scrambles to her feet and runs toward the overpass, screaming, “Hey! Hey!”
The girl on the overpass doesn’t seem to hear her. She continues stumbling forward.
“You’re not Dead!” Julie chokes through her tears. “You’re not Dead! You can come with us!”
Steely arms wrap around her from behind and pull her off her feet. “Julie,” her father hisses. “Jesus Christ, Julie.”
She collapses into her father’s grip, sobbing uncontrollably as blood streams down her chin and onto her t-shirt. She feels the cracks in the world widening. She feels it breaking.
Her father looks up at the girl on the overpass. “Miss?” he shouts like a weary cop reciting procedure. “Have you been bitten?”
The girl stares at him.
“Are you infected?”
She wobbles on her feet and says nothing.
Julie’s father scans the streets leading to the overpass, sizing up the risk and difficulty of reaching the girl, and shakes his head. He pulls Julie back toward the truck.
Julie tries to fight him but her body has gone limp. She feels his logic tugging at her brain but she fights that, too. His logic is sound. He’s not incorrect. But he’s wrong.
“Follow us!” Julie shouts hoarsely.
The girl on the overpass finally looks at her. Her gaze is unsteady, but so is Julie’s, blurred by hot streams of tears.
“We’re going to South Cascadia! There’s a stadium with people in it!”
Her father shoves her into the truck and slams the door. She rolls down the window and sticks her head out. “If you’re not Dead, come south! Meet us there!”
Without a word or a pause her father starts driving, resuming their slow crawl through traffic as if nothing has happened, but his face is harder that she has ever seen it. Her mother reaches back and dabs at her chin with a rag, soaking up the pink mixture of blood and tears. Julie’s eyes lock with hers, pleading for something she can’t articulate. Her mother’s lips tremble briefly, then they stiffen. She breaks away from Julie’s gaze.
“Your teeth might end up a little crooked,” she says, staring straight ahead. “But you’ll be okay. We’ll bandage your elbows at the next safe stop.” The Tahoe grinds against a rusted convertible and pushes it out of the way. A man-sized pile of rags crunches under the tires. “John, stop at the next department store please.”
“Why?”
Julie leans forward to find her mother’s face in the mirror, but all she can see is the white dress, her mother’s fingers tugging at the holes.