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The silence was torn out of the moment as screams filled the air.
5
Hannahlily
The shocked silence that gripped Hannahlily Bryce exploded into a shriek of absolute horror. There were people all around her. Strangers. Muddy and bloody and wrong. White faces with red mouths and black eyes. Plucking at the blanket and at her clothes, her hair, her skin.
“Tucker!”
But Tucker was frozen into the moment for one heartbeat longer than her. One heartbeat too long, his whole body locked into rigid stupefaction. His mouth worked as he tried to say something, ask something that would make sense of this; and the movement mirrored the movements of the hungry mouths around him.
Time suddenly seemed to slow down for Hannahlily. She saw the creatures huddled around her, she saw Tucker—muscular, powerful, capable, and totally frozen in fear—and she glimpsed the impossible future. Blood and pain and death. She didn’t even know how she understood the nature of this attack. It wasn’t a gang beating. This was death of a different kind, a nightmare kind. She saw the red mouths and she knew that.
We’re dead.
The thought was as clear in her mind as if she had spent hours contemplating this very incident.
And then suddenly time jumped back to normal as the mouths descended toward her flesh.
Hannahlily screamed as loud as she could, shoved Tucker away from her, rolled backward onto her shoulders and kicked upward at the creatures. She was slender, but she was strong. Cheerleading, gymnastics, dance. Fear. Her legs shot upward and her bare feet caught two of them under the chins. One foot sent a man with wire-frame glasses flying backward; the other caught the jaw of a woman with frizzy brown hair, and at that angle the woman’s head spun on the neck and there was a huge, wet crack!
As the woman fell backward, Hannahlily was moving. She bashed aside the white hands and scrambled toward Tucker, shoving and punching him until he suddenly snapped out of his stupor.
“God!” he yelled, and then he was on his feet, pulling Hannahlily up. Tucker punched one of the things in the face, smashing its nose with an overhand right that would have put most strong men down on their knees. The creature, a National Guardsman in the remains of a hazmat suit, merely staggered back from the force of the blow.
Two more of the things flung themselves at Tucker, and he went crazy on them. He was fast and powerful, kicking, head-butting, using every trick he’d learned in boxing and mixed martial arts, and he hit everything he tried to hit.
It just did no good.
“Run!” screamed Hannahlily. She grabbed the back of Tucker’s sweater and yanked him away from the grasping, biting, scratching knot of attackers. He stumbled backward and almost fell, but she pulled him back to his feet. Then he turned and shoved her, and they were running through the dining room into the kitchen and out through the open back door.
“The truck . . . the truck . . . the truck!” he bellowed, but Hannahlily was already heading for it at a pace that outstripped his. They ran around the house to where the truck was parked. The strange, hungry, moaning creatures staggered behind. Some chased them all the way to the truck, others seemed to become distracted by the storm and stumbled out into the fields or onto the road.
Then they were inside the truck. The keys were in the ignition. Out here, this deep in farm country, the keys were always in the ignition, and the big engine roared to life as if it, too, were startled into a desperate frenzy. The white figures were in the yard now, coming around the house toward the truck, but Tucker gave the truck as much gas as it would take. The back wheels spun for a moment, kicking up huge arcs of mud that splattered the figures and the side of the house; then the truck found purchase, and it shot forward toward the road.
A figure stood in the way, and it, more than all the others, seemed to be conjured from some bizarre fantasy of madness.
It was a woman in a pretty white bridal gown. Her mouth was open to scream her ugly need at Hannahlily; her hands reached out and clawed the air as if she could tear the young couple from the truck.
Tucker bellowed something incoherent and hit the gas as he steered right toward her. Then Hannahlily did something that she could never thereafter explain to herself. She grabbed the wheel and shoved it the other way, fighting Tucker’s strength to turn the pickup. The bride loomed in the headlights, but the truck swerved and only the rear fender brushed the bride. It was enough to lift her, to fling her into the teeth of the storm, to drop her in a muddy puddle.
But as the pickup roared down the road, Hannahlily turned and looked through the rear window, and in a flash of lightning saw the bride get slowly and shakily to her feet.
Tucker was yelling as the house dwindled behind them. “God . . . oh God . . . oh God! What’s happening? What were they?”
The truck punched a hole through the night, found the main road, and rocketed along it toward town.
Hannahlily heard a voice praying. It took her a moment to realize that it was her voice. Praying. Begging God and Mary and the saints. Using fragments of prayers she’d learned in Sunday school. Old stuff. She hadn’t been to church at all except for Christmas Eve with her folks. But as her awareness caught up with the prayers, she realized that in that moment those prayers were meant. They were meant with every last bit of who she was.
God. Please.
Please.
She remembered the crazy news stories and quickly turned on the radio.
The music stations played music.
The news, though.
