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—LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON), “THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB”
67
THEY REACHED THE SERPENTINE EXPANSE of Douglas Lake, still following I-40 but rarely going above twenty-five miles per hour. They made stops, though after a while they both felt hollowed out, with nothing left to give to the demands of the sickness.
They passed through Wilton Springs, pulled off the interstate and circled around to the 440 Truck Stop, which sat at the edge of a vast, mountainous forest. The truck stop’s diner was deserted, half of it crushed nearly flat by the body of a yellow-and-black Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The serial number—N90090—was readable, but most of the machine was either scorched black or rusted to a reddish-gray.
Mile marker signs on the side of the road told them they were only sixty-three miles from Asheville.
“Well,” said Riot wearily, “that’s something.”
Morgie nodded. “I guess.”
Riot glanced sharply at him and started to say something, but a fit of coughing stole her words. Morgie held out his canteen and she took it, still coughing.
Sixty-three miles. A few hours, even at reduced speed. They’d be there tonight.
To Morgie it felt as if they had been driving forever, as if the distance to where they’d left their friends was ten million miles, and the distance to home in California was incalculable. He and Riot were sick, weak, and exhausted, and so tired of riding. Every part of Morgie hurt, from the bones in his butt to the teeth in his clenched jaws. The diarrhea and vomiting were constant, and he felt like his whole body was made from wet tissue paper; anything could tear him apart.
They parked their bikes behind a massive tractor trailer that squatted on eighteen flat tires. When the engine noise died away, the world once again became a place of eerie quiet. In the sheltered cleft of a couple of smashed semis they made a camp. Morgie fell asleep right away and dreamed that he was home. Not in the new town of Reclamation but in Mountainside, before Benny ever left. In his dream, he and Benny and Chong were sitting on the steps of Lafferty’s General Store, each of them with a small stack of unopened packs of Zombie Cards. They were tearing open the wax paper and sorting through what they had, swapping doubles, making shrewd trades.
“Hey, look at this one,” said Chong. He held up a card for them to see, and on it was a zombie with wild hair, dead eyes, and jagged teeth biting a terrible red chunk out of Nix Riley’s throat.
Benny laughed. “That looks like Morgie,” he said brightly.
Chong snickered. “Morgue Mitchell,” he joked.
“I got a good one too,” said Benny, and the card he held up actually showed Morgie. But the image was of Riot standing over him as he lay facedown in the dirt, and she was about to drive a steel sliver into the back of his neck.
“Oh, cool,” said Chong. “I’ll trade you my extra Captain Ledger card for that.”
“Sure,” Benny agreed. “I have doubles. Morgie’s always getting killed.”
They both laughed at that as if it was a joke.
The zombie Morgie on the cards—both cards—began growling so loud that the dreaming Morgie could actually hear it. It was a low, deep, steady growl. He turned away from the sound and rolled right off the counter, slammed into the cracked red vinyl seats of the row of stools, and then crashed painfully to the floor. He woke in confusion and pain.
And froze, because waking up did not stop the growls.
It did, however, change them. Awareness transformed the snarls from the guttural moans of the living dead to the steady, aggressive roar of engines.
“Someone’s stealing our quads!” he yelled as he scrambled to his feet. Riot snapped awake and swung her legs over the edge. By the time her feet hit the floor, she had her slingshot out and was fishing for a ball bearing. Morgie snatched up his bokken.
Weak and sick as they were, they ran for the door, tore it open, and rushed out, ready to fight the thieves.
They were wrong, though.
The quads sat in the shadow of the big truck. The roar of motors came from up the road. Not quads, either.
A line of motorcycles was burning its way down the center of the blacktop.
Motorcycles.
Ten of them. And riding each were figures—male and female—dressed in soiled leather set with studs and chains. Their faces were harsh and discolored, more dead than alive.
They were ravagers.
Morgie and Riot flattened out on the ground and peered under the truck as the bikes thundered by. The lead biker was a brute of a man with enormous arms that were so overpacked with muscles that he looked deformed, apelike. His face was equally simian, with stiff orange hair and a filthy beard in which leaves and bugs were stuck. He had guns and knives sticking out of holsters and pockets, and a huge scythe strapped to his bike so the big curved blade arched over his head. A name was painted in silver script on the bulbous fuel tank of the Harley.
