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Moving carefully, she knelt down and fished under the nearest car for her knife, but it was too far away. So she stretched out on her stomach and half crawled into the darkness below, scrabbling at the weapon’s leather-wrapped handle, coaxing it into the curl of her fingers.
A sound made her freeze.
Scuffing sounds.
At first she saw nothing, and for a broken moment she wondered if she was only imagining the sounds.
Laws a mercy, no . . .
The unmistakable sound of clumsy feet moving uncertainly along the blacktop.
Not merely one set of feet.
Many.
And then the moans.
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She scrambled out from under the car and clawed her way up the side of the vehicle until she was on her feet. Her head still swam from the fall, but her legs didn’t buckle.
Thanks for small mercies, she thought sourly.
She rose cautiously and peered over the hood of the car.
A dead child was right there. Ten feet away.
It might have been a little boy once. It was impossible to tell. There was so little of it left—just enough for the body to remain upright and the limbs to move. But clearly the hungry dead who killed him had feasted for far too long on the tiny body. A head that was more skull than face drooped on a ruined neck.
“Oh, you poor baby,” she whispered.
But even a whisper was too much.
The child’s head snapped up; the destroyed face turned toward her. All that was left of the ears were lumps of gristle, but somehow it heard her. Its shredded nose wrinkled like a dog sniffing the air.
The girl jerked back from the side of the car.
If the dead had been an adult, or even a child whose body was still mostly intact, she would have reacted differently. She knew that, even though it was too late to do anything about it.
The creature opened its lipless mouth and moaned at her.
It was a sound without form but one that was filled with meaning. A broken, bottomless cry of hunger.
Then the thing was moving toward her, colliding blindly with the fender of the car, bouncing off, trying again, moving toward her smell, edging by some crude instinct toward the front of the vehicle. Coming for her.
She would have to flee or kill it.
Indecision rooted her to the spot, chained her to the moment.
Behind her was the tank and the long road back to the empty FunMart.
In front of her were the cars.
And the shapes that she could now see moving among them. They were as pale and dusty as the cars, shambling artlessly between the dead machines, bumping into one another, crunching over bones, spent shell casings, and ancient debris.
Move, move, MOVE, you fool girl!
As abruptly as if someone had snapped fingers in front of her eyes, the spell was broken and she was moving. She put one foot onto the bumper of the car, and just as the dead child rounded the headlight and reached for her, the girl climbed quickly onto the hood, up the windshield, and onto the roof.
