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They bumped into each other without rancor or argument. It happened. They lost balance, recovered, moved on, either toward another collision or toward the door. Eventually it was all toward the door. Toward the movement outside. Lights in the rain. The stink of gasoline fumes, and beneath that was the smell of living meat.
One by one they collided with the heavy glass door, rebounded, hit it again until it open, stepping into the teeth of the storm with their own teeth bared. Unaware of the stinging rain or the hands of wind that tried to push them back. They moved toward the parked cars, sniffed the air, found only trace scents—old scents—but nothing alive. They staggered on through the small parking lot, spreading out, some heading toward the line of red taillights, others toward the line of white oncoming lights.
The first of them that stepped onto the highway was a man with a green apron and a matching billed cap. He had no fingers. They’d all been bitten off. Some by Homer Gibbon, though this man had no idea who that was. He had no thought at all, about Homer or anyone, anything, except the hunger. He stepped off the grassy verge and walked directly into the hazy dark gap between two bright headlights of a UPS tractor trailer going seventy miles an hour.
The impact smashed him into the air and hurled him thirty feet away. It exploded him. Parts of him were flung all the way over the truck. One arm struck the window of a blue Subaru hard enough to crack the glass. The rest of him was pulped beneath the semi’s wheels as the UPS truck tried to brake.
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sp; There was a moment when the truck seemed to defy gravity, to rise like a balloon as mass and momentum and the storm-slick road conjured bad magic in the night. The semi slewed sideways and the trailer hunched up and over it, snapping cables and tearing metal. The two cars behind it, the CNN van, and the Walmart truck behind it punched one-two-three into the twisting truck and into each other. The storm was too violent for that kind of road speed. Everyone knew it, and everyone drove that fast regardless. The storm and the plague killed them for it.
The air above the eastbound lane was filled with a scream of metal and the popping of safety glass, the hiss of tires that were finding no genuine purchase on the wet roads, and the whump-crunch of vehicle hitting vehicle.
Thirty yards away the same vehicular gavotte was imitated on the westbound lane as three of the infected walked into the traffic. Cars and trucks slammed each other into accordion shapes. Other vehicles tried to swerve but there was nowhere to go in that kind of traffic.
On another night when there was no storm and no major crisis, the roads would have been far less crowded. There would have been no rubberneckers, no press, no emergency vehicles, no troop transports, and no cars filled with family and friends trying to get to their missing loved ones in Stebbins.
Cars spun and danced, lifting from the asphalt as big trucks hit them. Airbags popped like firecrackers. Seat belts restrained and they broke and they cut into flesh. The last of the bloody figures from Starbucks moved onto the highway and were crushed by the colliding cars.
Then the symphony of impacts faded out, replaced by the blare of horns and the rising chorus of screams.
For a short time—a precious short time—the infected were unable to attack, each of them defeated by the metal things they had tried to attack to get at the soft food within. The victims of Homer Gibbon’s attacks were crippled and mangled, every last one of them.
It would be nearly six minutes before the first ambulances arrived, filled with EMTs who would see hurt people in the wreckage. Badly hurt and yet somehow still alive. Still moving. The EMTs would work shoulder to shoulder with ordinary civilians, survivors of the wrecks or people who’d been able to stop their cars and rushed forward to help. The EMTs and the civilians would work like heroes to pull the mangled people from the wrecks. To triage them, to stabilize them. To save them. Driven by professional responsibility, they would do everything they could to preserve the lives of the suffering wounded.
All of this happened less than one mile outside of the Stebbins Q-zone.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHECKPOINT #43
STEBBINS COUNTY LINE
Lonnie Silk saw the soldiers up ahead and his heart lifted in his chest.
They wore the same kind of combat hazmat suit he did, but their’s were intact, and they still had weapons. Both of the soldiers had they hoods off, though. Lonnie recognized them. The sergeant, anyway. Rodriguez. Lonnie couldn’t remember his first name. The other guy was a stranger. Some white kid.
It was the best thing he could see.
Someone he knew.
More important, soldiers. People who could help him.
Lonnie raised his hand, took as deep a breath as his aching lungs could manage, and called out to them.
Except that’s not what happened.
It took Lonnie a few seconds to realize that what he thought he did and what he actually did were slanting downhill in different ways.
It wasn’t one hand that he raised. Both hands came up. Not in a signaling gesture. Not a wave at all. His hands came up and reached toward the two soldiers as if, even from this distance, he could touch them.
No.
Not touch.
Grab.
Grab?
