Red Hill (Page 10)

“No, Coop,” I said to the rearview mirror. “You’re not getting out of this car.”

“But my mom and my little sister. My dad’s not around. They’re alone. I should try to get to them.”

I took a breath, trying not to think of my own mom. She was in Belize with my stepfather, Rick. That was why we’d made plans to visit my dad at his ranch in the first place. “They live in Texas, Coop. Let’s get to the ranch, get some supplies, and then we’ll go get them, okay?” I was lying. Cooper might have known it, too, but my dad’s ranch was north, everybody was running north, and Cooper’s mother and sister were south. Maybe one day he could try, but we’d all seen enough end-of-the-world flicks to know how this was going to go down: mass chaos and carnage until the population whittled down. That’s when the walking dead would start leaving the cities to find a meal, but by then we’d be settled in and well educated in the art of zombicide. We had to survive the next few weeks first. The ranch would be the best place to do that.

A guy about our age bumped my door and then tripped and fell just out of sight. “Stay away!” I yelled, leaning forward to try to make eye contact with whoever decided to molest my three-day-old car.

Another running, screaming passerby knocked his hip against my side mirror. A woman trailed behind him, but stopped, and then crawled across my hood. I cussed again, shoving the gear into reverse. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’re going to tear us apart.” Just as I turned to get a handle on how far I could back up, from the corner of my eye I saw a flesh-colored struggle in the same spot the first man had fallen.

“Miranda?” Bryce said. “He’s . . . he’s got him.”

I peered over my steering wheel, watching the second man trying to pull his arm out of the mouth of the first. A mixture of screaming and moans rose from their frantic wrestling match.

Bryce put both hands on his forehead just as the first man took a large bite of flesh and pulled away. Blood sprayed the biter’s face, and meat and tendons trailed from his mouth to the arm of his prey.

Ashley’s shrill scream filled my ear, and for a moment, a buzzing noise accompanied a fainter version of what I’d just heard. I looked over at Bryce, and his face paled, his eyes saying everything he couldn’t find words for.

I slammed my foot against the accelerator, only stopping when I felt the back of the Bug hit the car behind us. In the next moment, the gearshift was in drive, and I was maneuvering between a semi-truck and a minivan—both empty. The Bug tossed us up and down as it climbed across the asphalt to the shoulder.

“Don’t stop!” Ashley said. “Keep going!”

We passed more people, unsure of who was running and who was chasing. I saw parents carrying their young children, and pulling along older ones by the hand. A couple of times people screamed at me to stop, begged me to help them, but stopping always meant dying in the movies, and I was barely eighteen. I wasn’t sure how long we could survive, but I knew I wasn’t dying on day one of the f**king zombie apocalypse.

Scarlet

It was a risk, taking the old two-lane highway, but it was the quickest way to my children besides the interstate, and that would be suicide. The Jeep was part of a caravan of cars that had managed to make it out of the city. There were maybe ten or fifteen of us. The silver Toyota Camry in front of me had a forward-facing car seat in the back, and I hoped there was a child in it.

Mile after mile of farmland passed, and then someone at the front slowed. We were coming up on a bridge, and for whatever reason, the car at the front was being cautious. Fear surged through every vein in my body. We couldn’t stop. We had to keep going no matter what was ahead. I might have been in a Jeep, but it wouldn’t cross the river. No matter what, I was going over that bridge.

I couldn’t see why the car in front had slowed down until I reached the bridge. An old, glacier-blue Buick was stalled on the side of the road. The windows were rolled up, and a couple remained inside. A woman was staring blankly out the window, only moving when the man next to her tugged while he tore at her flesh with his teeth.

Instinctively, I thought to cover the eyes of my children. In the same moment I realized they weren’t with me, and the panic and anxiety of getting to them, and wondering where they were and if they were scared or okay, became nearly too overwhelming for me to drive.

“I’m coming, babies,” I said, swallowing the sob welling up in my throat.

One long stretch of highway north and another equally long stretch to the east would lead me to my girls. Two small towns stood between us. Their populations were only a few thousand, if that, but that was too many people to wade through if the dead were wandering the streets.

Most of the caravan turned west, toward more rural areas. It was the direction I would have headed if my girls were with me. West on Highway 11 was one of the roads we would’ve taken to get to Dr. Hayes’s ranch.

Along with just two other vehicles, I turned the Jeep east, where each town’s population was bigger than the last: Kellyville, Fairview, and then Anderson was on the other side of the interstate.

The stories of the families in the other two vehicles piqued my curiosity. Ahead of me was the Toyota with the car seat, behind me was a green seventies-ish pickup truck. Whether it held one person or a family I couldn’t tell; the truck kept several car lengths back.

Five minutes from Kellyville, my hands began to tremble. I wondered if the other two drivers were as afraid as I was. Preparing for an outbreak like this was impossible, even when we’d been told for decades that it could happen, and were presented with hundreds of different methods of survival by the entertainment industry. Hoarding food, weapons, medicine. But none of that mattered if you were bitten . . . or eaten.

The Toyota sped up a bit as we entered Kellyville’s city limits. My nerves were on edge, and my brow felt damp. At any second a quick turn or evasion maneuver might be necessary.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the town appeared abandoned. No walking dead, no living humans. No running, no screaming. It gave me hope that maybe some way, somehow, the epidemic had stalled.

We left unscathed, just as we had come in, but it felt too easy. Something wasn’t right. I turned up the volume on the radio, but the news was the same. Once in a while they would report that someone famous had been found dead or was killed because they’d succumbed to the sickness spreading, but even then the story was similar.

The DJ reported that the state capitol had been overrun just as we entered the west side of Fairview. A sick feeling came over me as we passed the high school. Bodies littered the football field, whole and in parts. I couldn’t tell if it was students or adults, or a little of both. I tried not to look that close. A few corpses were ambling around, but nothing like I’d expected to see in a town overrun. Maybe they had gotten out.

The Toyota ahead of me slowed to a stop. I wasn’t sure what to do. In the rearview mirror, the pickup stopped, too, maybe a hundred yards back. I waited for a moment, and then glanced around, hoping for an answer.

I had several all in one second.

The church on the corner was surrounded by reanimated corpses. Women, men . . . and children. Some with torn, bloody clothes, some I couldn’t tell had been wounded at all, but I could see from the road that they all shared the same milky-white eyes. I shuttered at the sight, feeling more desperate to get going.