Hissers (17 page)

Then die trying. What do you care anymore, anyway?

He took a step and launched off the roof, leapt over the heads of the hissers, landed and rolled on the grass of the nearest house. The wound on his shin screamed in protest. He rolled up onto his feet and took off running down the street.

I can beat these guys. I can beat these guys.

Her leg was exposed, she saw blood-stained teeth leaning in for a bite. She kicked and yanked and kicked and yanked. Whacked her shin into the monster’s nose, and then got her leg back under the SUV. Her screams were so loud she could not tell the difference between the vehicle’s incessant horn and her own shrill voice.

Amanita slashed her nails at the faces creeping in after her and convulsed at the sight of an eyeball opening with a razor thin slice.

Then the faces whipped out of sight. The crazed flesh-eaters stood up, remained bow-legged for a half a second, and then took off running down the street. It made no sense but she didn’t care. She rolled her head and looked out from under the SUV. All the feet were charging away as well.

Tears cascaded down her cheeks, ran into the corners of her mouth. Her chest continued to rise and fall in panic and she had to fight to catch her breath.

Finally, the horn stopped. Only the sound of her wheezing remained audible over the gentle purr of the SUV’s engine.

“Am! Hurry up! Get out!”

It was Nicole, her voice clear as if she were leaning out of the window.

“Nicole? Are they gone?”

“Yes. Hurry up and get in the car.”

She squirmed out from under the car and stood up. Nicole was indeed leaning out of the driver’s side window. “You okay?”

Hell no I’m not okay,
she wanted to yell. Instead she glanced down at her legs and ran her hands around her jeans. They were torn and the shin of her right leg was exposed but the bastards had not broken her skin at all. “I’m fine.”

The back door opened and Seth was there, moving across to his seat. “Then get in. We have to get to the police station.”

Amanita climbed in and shut the door. Something felt wrong about the empty space in the front seat, about Nicole being in the driver’s seat. Hadn’t she seen Connor get inside? Was he hurt? Did he die?

“Where’s Connor?”

“Somewhere out there,” Seth said, looking out the window.

“Okay, this might be rough.” Nicole stepped on the gas. The car jumped forward and everyone flew off their seats. “First time, guys. Sorry.” This time she applied gentle pressure and the SUV moved forward gracefully.

“You smell like piss,” Seth said.

Amanita looked down at the wet spot on her lap and began to cry.

Saturday, 11:15

This was worse than doing sprints at soccer practice. There was no reprieve at the end of the field. This was constant exertion for one’s life, legs pumping so fast they burned. Stitches ran up Connor’s sides as he cut right at the end of the block, tore across someone’s unkempt front lawn and found himself on an unfamiliar street. The adrenaline coursing through his body was tapering off, making it hard to breathe. He was hell and gone from the police station.

Keep going. Just run until you fall down and die.

He didn’t look behind him because he already knew what chased him, he could hear it echoing in the air, could smell it washing over him like a tsunami.

He reached the end of this block, took another right, calculating how he might get to the police station by the way the crow flies. He needed to head north west, stay off the roads.

Over the fences and through the yards, to grandmother’s house we go.

He spotted a group of twenty-somethings in the street up ahead, hovering around a car. One of them held a beer. They stood like statues watching him advance. Did they see the massive crowd of flesh-eaters behind him? They must have, it was their in their eyes, in the way one of them had his beer can halfway to his mouth, just hovering there. They were bigger than Connor, stronger, could maybe help him. No, somehow they had not met Castor’s newest problem yet.

But they sure as hell would in ten more seconds.

He yelled for help anyway, told them to start the car, let him in, but his voice was gone. His mouth dedicated itself to the sole task of sucking in gulping breaths as he fought through the cramps in his sides.

A hisser lunged at him. He didn’t see the man attack, merely saw the body go flying by his left side as he cut up a driveway. The body rolled into a bush and got tangled inside it. The others ran up the driveway after him, some bouncing off the side of the house. Somewhere behind him he heard a challenge, then a scream. He could see the bloody beer can rolling in the street in his mind’s eye.

We’re all gonna die. They won’t stop. We need guns.

There was a swing set in the back yard, but in the dark he almost didn’t see it until it was too late. He leapt over the swing, saw the black outline of the five-foot wooden fence ahead of him, its pointed slats like teeth jutting up from the earth. He judged the crossbeams, knew by the time he stopped to step on the lower one they’d get him. He could practically feel their fingertips on his shoulders.

This is it. The end. Please let it be quick.

Instead of going for the cross beam he leapt for the top and wrapped his hands around the points. The wood cut into his hands, but he paid it no mind. He let his momentum carry him up, pushed up to the top. Behind him he heard the massive collision with the swing set. Chains rattled, a metal slide groaned. He got one leg over the top, turned himself around, caught sight of the pile up in the backyard. Thirty to forty upset flesh-eaters, hissing and flailing and twisting to get up on their feet the way cats do when placed on their backs. It was a reprieve, maybe enough to get far enough ahead to hide, but he knew he couldn’t stop and find out.

He hit the ground in the next yard and ran. Behind him, he heard the fence shaking as his hunters did their best to scale it.

Saturday, 11:21

“Turn here.” Seth read the street sign as they drove by it. “I think it said Junger. Anyone know Junger?”

“Yeah,” Nicole answered. “We’re near Swanson’s Liquors.”

She knew it because Amanita knew it, had talked about standing out front and asking some of the men in town to buy them wine. Nicole had argued they’d get reported and go to jail. Amanita had told her not to worry, that guys like young girls.
Put on a wife beater and don’t wear a bra underneath. Guys will do anything for you. Hell, the cops in this two-bit town will buy for us.

In the end Nicole had talked Amanita out of such an idiotic plan. Partly because she didn’t want a run in with the police marring her record and screwing up her chances of getting into a good college, and partly because she was too afraid to show her body. There were things she was not willing to expose to people.

She rubbed her thigh absentmindedly as she straightened the SUV out.

“Swanson’s is on the north side of Farmers.” Amanita climbed up into the front seat. “If we’re near Farmers we’re actually close by the police station.”

On the radio, the news reporter confirmed that a plane had indeed crashed in Castor but that no reports had yet been filed and no authorities had issued a statement yet. The press may as well have been playing twenty questions for all they seemed to know.

“Connor better show up or I’ll kill him,” Nicole said, turning down the volume.

There was a silence as they continued on another two blocks and finally found the T-intersection to Farmers Road.

It was chaos.

A dozen cars were piled up in the middle, headlights stabbing up into treetops, onto the curbs, onto the upside down interiors of overturned cars. The other cars driving on the road did their best to circumvent the grim sculpture of vehicular death but only succeeded in causing a horn-blaring traffic jam. Everyone still alive was intent on getting to the Jefferson Bridge.

But that wasn’t the worst part. Half the town, now hissers, climbed on the pileup like ants on a dead rodent. They leapt off and ran across the lanes attacking anyone who couldn’t get around.

“There’s so many of them,” Seth said. “Who are these people?”

“I don’t recognize anyone,” Nicole said.

“At least there are real people driving,” Seth continued, his voice slightly more hopeful. “We’re not the only ones. We need to all get together or something. Strength in numbers and all that.”

“But it’s like they don’t even know what they’re seeing,” Amanita replied. “Why are they still trying to drive by? They need to get off the road
now
, not try to squeeze around.”

Nicole turned off the headlights. The undead hadn’t paid them any mind yet, no doubt too focused on the cars right in front of them. “This is panic, madness. Where are the cops?”

In front of them a man and his small son were being dragged from their car. The father reached for his little boy, yelled, “Close your eyes, Travis. Close your—” and was slashed and bitten by four men and a woman with half-eaten faces. Travis’s young screams made everyone’s hair stand up, the sound like nails on a chalkboard. His innocent eyes were still open when the first bearded face swooped in and bit his lips off. In seconds the little boy’s body was torn in two, one pack of flesh-eaters running off with his legs, the other group running away with his tiny head and torso.

Nicole slowly backed the SUV up. “No way. We can’t get through this.”

In front of them, the father rose from the ground, his throat opened wide, his severed left arm still lying near his feet. He opened his yellow eyes and hissed at the line of cars backed up to the south. With a jump he launched himself at them. When he landed, he bent down over a collection of severed abandoned appendages, rolled in the meat and gristle like a dog in a pile of trash, and then rose again.

Where his arm had been ripped off at the shoulder there was now a new “arm.” A woman’s leg, chewed in half just a few inches above the knee, had attached itself. He studied it for a brief moment. He looked dumbfounded, as if questioning his act, this new addition. It was not the look of a man who’d made a conscious choice, it was the look of an animal bewildered by its own instinctual movements. The leg bent up and down at the knee, the foot flapping its high-heeled shoe on the end as it responded to neural requests meant for a hand.

He paid it no more mind. He took off running, no longer a father, no longer human.

Saturday, 11:32

The street was empty, dark, abandoned. Somewhere behind him he heard an explosion, a siren. Were the cops fighting back? Was anybody?

And where the hell am I?

Connor risked a look back over his shoulder. He could hear the mobs of flesh-eaters on nearby streets, but he seemed to have outwit the giant pack that had been chasing him. Maybe they were still tangled in the swingset.

There will be more,
he warned himself.

He stopped and bent over in the shadows of a small apartment complex. People were talking inside one of the units. Real people. Live people.

Correction: they weren’t talking, they were pleading.

Then he heard the muffled pop and saw the flash of white in the window above him. There were more:
pop pop pop!
A bullet screamed out the window, raining glass to the lawn. Now Connor could hear the struggle going on inside.

A woman shouted: “Get it off! Get it off!”

Someone answered:
pop pop pop!

There was hissing and the sounds of flimsy furniture shattering.

To his continual dismay, he saw loping silhouettes at the end of the road, coming his way.

“I can’t run anymore. Please, God, I can’t.” He was not religious and only realized he was praying on a subconscious level. It was more the idea that wherever these inhuman creatures had come from must have an opposite pole, and if that pole existed it could only be the ultimate good.

Which meant it was either Santa Claus or God.

Unless God was the cause of this. Then where did that leave everybody? Praying to a savior who was upstairs right now sucking down suds and watching Castor tear itself apart like a lame reality show.

No, that was ridiculous, whatever was causing this mass transformation of the living into the dead was not supernatural. It was a viral or chemical reaction, something biological that could be transmitted and passed from human to human. It was the only way to explain the biting and sudden resurrections.

“Did we make this shit, God? This our doing? Because I didn’t get a vote. And I can’t run.”

The faintest bit of moonlight fell on the silhouettes as they jogged closer. Maybe ten of them all together. A few old, a few young, a few fat, a few thin—a cross section of the town, except
normal
Castor folk didn’t drag their intestines behind them. Even at this distance, their ravaged skin and gaping wounds were easily discernable.