Authors: Keith Varney
The wheels are now firmly in contact with the pavement as Sarah accelerates. They slam into the Camry, flipping it up on its side and smashing it into a Jeep. Glass flies everywhere. The sound from the impact booms its way down the trench and is followed by a series of teeth-clenching metal scraping noises as the tanker struggles to push cars out of its path.
The enormous engine roars as they plow their way down the freeway. Several former citizens of Detroit are trapped between cars and cut in half. After narrowly avoiding a black Escalade, they finally hit a patch of open road and are able to drive in the clear for a bit. Sarah throws the rig into fourth gear and accelerates.
“Why are you speeding up?!”
“We’ve got to get through that line of cars at the exit.”
Chris sees what she is headed for. The off-ramp leading up and to the right is blocked by a line of cars.
Sarah continues. “We need as much momentum as we can get. We’re going to have to push through them uphill!”
“Right. But keep in mind we’re carrying nine thousand gallons of gasoline. We’re a rolling bomb.”
Sarah frowns. “Yeah. And there I was thinking we were running out of things that were about to kill us.”
They hit the exit ramp going nearly fifty miles per hour. The first car they hit, a Honda Accord, is thrown airborne by the enormous force of the tanker. It flips up into the air, flies off the ramp and slams back down onto the highway below. It rolls once and scrapes along the concrete wall for nearly twenty yards before finally coming to rest. The tanker careens forward squeezing itself between the railing and the row of vehicles that had been attempting to get off Fisher at exit 50. It clips the side of a delivery van and runs into an unfortunate curious Fred who explodes like a bug on the enormous grill. Various body parts fly up and into the windshield causing both Chris and Sarah to unconsciously groan unspellable noises of horror.
They reach the top of the exit ramp and believe they are home free, or at least off the freeway, before Sarah runs into the curb trying to take the corner too sharply. The cab bounces into the air and starts to tip at a sickening angle.
“Oh fuck!”
Chris’ momentary sensation of weightlessness causes an instantaneous bout of stomach-clenching nausea. He watches Sarah hover above him as the cab debates whether or not to flip over.
The weight of the tank behind the cab
combined with a well-welded hitch is the only thing that prevents Chris and Sarah from death that evening. The hitch holds and the cab bounces back down heavily.
Sarah never loses control of the wheel and continues down the street, but she can taste a coppery liquid filling her mouth. She realizes she must have bitten her tongue pretty badly slamming back down and spits the blood out at her feet. The image of the red splat on her shoes combined with the bitter metallic taste chews at her consciousness. Her peripheral vision starts dimming as she knocks into a parked Volkswagen turning down Woodward Ave.
“Sarah?”
She can hear someone trying to talk to her. It’s faint.
Perhaps a dream? Or just a memory?
“Sarah!!” Chris puts his arm on her shoulder and gives her a strong shake.
She begins to feel the unnerving sensation that the murky world she thought wasn’t real, is very real indeed.
“Sarah brake! Brakes!!”
She can see a building approaching. Something about it seems too real to be a figment of her imagination and she realizes that she is still driving and they are about to run into a fast food restaurant. She slams on the air brakes. The pedal shudders under her foot as the cab around her begins to shake. The brakes make an inconceivably loud noise, like a combination of an air horn and a metallic scream. They miss running into a sign for the Golden Arches by only a few feet.
“Sarah what’s wrong? Did you pass out!?”
She is still groggy but she fights through the fog. “I’m ok. I just greyed out for a bit. Sorry.”
The tanker sits idling loudly face to face with a smiling red and yellow plastic clown. They can see Fred and Gingers starting to stumble around the corner investigating the noise.
“We have to keep moving. It’s almost dark. Are you OK to drive?”
Sarah swallows her nausea and grimly nods. She spits another mouthful of blood at her feet. Now driving at a less reckless speed, she navigates the rig through the neighborhood and arrives on the side street next to their parking garage. She kills the engine immediately, knowing each second of noise draws more zombies. They look out the windows and see that, once again, they are completely surrounded. There are not nearly as many there as were funneled into the highway, but enough that they are definitely not safe to exit the truck. A few of them bump into the tanker, but since it stopped making noise, they seem to have a hard time identifying its meaty center.
“There’s too many to try and out-run. We’ll have to wait for them to disperse. I guess we’re spending the night in the cab.”
Sarah looks nervously at the broken sunroof above their heads. Chris nods and pulls a roll of duct tape and a tarp out of his emergency bag. He spreads the tarp over the hole and tapes it down.
“Good enough for now. Not like we have any choice.” He surveys the interior of the cab. Opening a curtain behind their seats, he discovers a small sleeping area with a twin mattress. It is littered with more candy and fast food wrappers. Chris grimaces when he discovers a large Gatorade bottle filled with what is clearly urine. Several pictures are taped to the walls that have obviously been torn out of dirty magazines. Chris beckons to Sarah. “We’ve got the honeymoon suite tonight.”
When Sarah looks back at him, Chris notices she looks pretty white.
Maybe she’s just overwhelmed
?
“I have something to tell you.” She says simply.
“What’s that?
“I broke my ankle. When I jumped onto the van.”
“What!? You didn’t tell me! How did you drive? How could you possibly have-?”
Sarah interrupts him with a grim smile. “I’m going to pass out now. See you in a bit.”
She does indeed pass out. Chris pulls her onto the mattress, trying to ignore the occasional suspicious stain on the fabric. He lies her down as gently as possible and looks over her ankle. It is already purple and has swollen up to twice its regular size. He tears up an old sheet he found tucked between the mattress and the wall and attempts to find something to serve as a splint for her ankle. He eventually finds the source of the dirty pictures in a stack of well-worn porn magazines under the mattress. He rolls a couple of them around her ankle and ties them down as tightly as he can with strips of fabric and duct tape. He then takes their two backpacks and uses them to elevate her ankle. He wishes he could give her some pain medicine. They have Advil in their emergency bags, but Sarah does not stir. So he just holds her hand and listens to her breathing.
In ten minutes he has no choice but to sit feeling helpless, exhausted and immensely frustrated by the fact that there is nothing else he can do to help his wife.
“Meeeerrrrow?”
A quiet mewling is floating out from the cat carrier. He opens the cage and Charlie emerges looking about as shell-shocked as Chris and Sarah. He offers the kitten some water from his bottle and Charlie drinks greedily. Chris finds himself immensely grateful for the company as he watches the last of the light disappear behind the grey line of buildings. Soon, the exhausted man and the traumatized kitten sit together in complete darkness. They listen to the zombies shuffle and bump into the cab now and then. It’s cold. Their body heat does help warm up the cab a little bit, but the late fall night brings temperatures down to the mid-thirties.
With nothing else to do, Chris has plenty of time to ponder the cold. One of the secrets that homeless people and animals know is that thirty degrees when you are walking down the street to get a Pumpkin Spice latte, or going for a yuppie fall jog is a completely different temperature than thirty degrees when you are stuck outdoors permanently. It’s a different experience when ten minutes in the cold turns into ten hours. It begins to seep into all parts of your body, radiating from every object. The cold begins to take on its own characteristics, as if it were a thing not a temperature. It feels stiff and sore, like a bruise.
Chris wraps Sarah in both of their jackets and the two ratty blankets that were on top of the mattress. He sits lookout from the driver’s seat shivering with his hands in his armpits.
Chris does not believe in God. Religion has never even been a part of his life and he’s never felt the absence of a deity. He’s not a secret believer who pretends to espouse atheism out of some sort of intellectual vanity, but then prays when feeling desperate. He truly has no one to ask for help.
But he does realize that for this night at least, he dearly wishes there were something more powerful than himself to look out for them. To look out for her.
But Chris knows that wishing will not make it so.
Chapter 12
It’s a beautiful morning in Detroit. There is a cold crispness to the air but the sun is shining brightly. Weather like this would normally brighten the moods of the people waking up to it, bright sunlight being such a rarity for this part of the country, especially in this time of the year. It’s the type of morning that could make you think that the Lions might actually have a shot against the Packers this Sunday, or that there is a chance Uncle Pete might just be able to contain himself from saying something racist when the turkey arrives at Thanksgiving dinner. But this morning there is nobody in the city that is even aware of the unseasonably cheery weather.
Chris tried to keep watch through the night, but exhaustion eventually took over and he has fallen asleep. He’s slumped against the passenger side door with his head resting on the window. Charlie huddles in a ball of fur on his chest.
Sarah is awakened by a sunbeam glaring onto her face and sleepily rubs her eyes. When she tries to turn over, she is rudely reminded of her broken ankle by the shot of red pain that runs up her leg and seems to radiate all the way to the tips of her fingers. She swears under her breath and looks over at Chris.
She tries to muffle her scream behind her hands.
The anguished sound she makes sends Charlie bolting off to the relative safety under the passenger seat. Chris sits up with a start.
Ignoring the agony in her foot, Sarah scrambles away from Chris in terror. Chris frantically looks around for the danger before he realizes it’s him she is afraid of.
She stares intensely into his eyes for a moment and is finally able to speak. “Chris!? Is that you? Are you OK?”
“Yeah. Of course. What are you talking about?!”
She points behind him at the window. On the inside of the glass, where he had been leaning his head, the window has fogged up with condensation. Beads of water drip slowly down the glass. There is a spot where his forehead rubbed a section of the water clean.
And yet Chris is very much aware of himself and very much not a zombie.
“Why? Why didn’t it infect you?”
“I don’t know!”
He stares at the glass for a while and wipes the wetness off his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.
“Wait. It’s not from the outside. It’s from inside. From my breath.”
Sarah lets out a weak sigh of relief and is silent for a moment.
“How is your ankle?”
“Hurts like a motherfucker.”
“You should take some Advil.”
“Yeah, I should take a lot more than that, but not until we get inside.”
Chris looks out the window to see how many Fred and Gingers are still around. There are a few of them shuffling down the block and one walking down the alley next to the tanker.
He nods. “Not too bad. We should be OK if we’re quiet. But how are we going to get in if you can’t climb up the fire escape?”
“We don’t have to climb. I have the key to the garage’s emergency exit.”
“What?! You had that the whole time? Why didn’t we go out that way in the first place?”
“Well I’d rather not advertise to the Fred and Gingers that we’re ever in the garage. Who knows, they might remember where the noise came from. Besides, you were so excited about playing Indiana Jones.” Her paragraph is punctuated by a coughing spell.
“Are you OK? You look a little feverish.”
“I’m fine. Let’s focus on getting inside.”
Chris begins to packs up their gear. As he puts a reluctant Charlie back in his cage, they plan their escape. After a few minutes, they open the passenger side door as slowly and quietly as they can. Chris goes first and then helps Sarah down. She winces with each step, unable to put weight on her ankle.
As quietly as possible, but without hesitation, they work their way around the front of the rig and look down the alley toward the garage’s side door. Sarah leans heavily on Chris, holding the cage in her other hand.
Slowly walking down the alley between them and the door is what used to be a thin black woman. She must have been truly beautiful before but now she is shrunken and hollow. The skin on the bottoms of her feet have worn down to the point where they can hear the ‘click… click… click’ of her fibula bone hitting the pavement as she walks in no particular direction.
Propping Sarah up, Chris takes a baseball out of his pocket and holds it in his right hand. He looks at Sarah to confirm she knows the plan. When she nods, he tosses the baseball over the Ginger’s head, well past the door. The ball bounces off the pavement and runs into a couple of metal trashcans at the end of the alley. The body that used to be inhabited by Kirsten (“Not Kristen!”), an aspiring model who dreamt of moving to New York City and modeling clothes on Project Runway, turns and begins moving in the direction of the noise.
Chris and Sarah move in behind her towards the door. They’re making more sound than they would like to, but they mutually and instinctually decide that speed is more important than stealth at the moment. Sarah has the key out by the time they reach the door and long before Kirsten, not Kristen, turns around, they are safely in their parking garage.