100-Days-in-Deadland(6)

The crazies were less than thirty feet away and quickly closing in. I snapped my gaze back to the trucker, pleading. “Mister, please!”

He moved his head slightly to check out the crazies closing in. He spit off to my right and pulled in his gun. “If you want to live, you’d better climb in.”

I heard the pop of the door unlocking, and I stepped to the side to open it. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I murmured as I crawled over him, knocking his cap askew, on my way to the passenger seat. Once there, I fastened the seatbelt as fast as I could in case the trucker changed his mind and tried to shove me out. Alan came in right behind me, only he collapsed in the cab behind us. The driver slammed the door shut, set the gun between him and the door, and grabbed the long shifter. Air shot from the brakes.

A crazy rammed the door and clawed at the now-closed window. The truck lurched forward, and the man in a bloodied business suit tumbled off the truck.

“Damn zeds,” the driver muttered, his hat still crooked.

“Zeds?” I frowned, recognizing the term. “You don’t mean…”

He pointed outside where several crazies stood literally dead ahead of us. “You know damn well what they are.”

What the trucker had said made perfect sense, but it shouldn’t be possible. Yet, not only did one of the infected try to eat me less than an hour ago, they moved like zeds—zombies—clumsily and relentlessly. No different from the crazies in front of us now. With no regard to their well-being, they kept shambling toward the truck barreling down the road on its way to meet them.

“I guess you’re right,” I said softly as the realization of fiction becoming reality hammered at the tension headache already pounding behind my forehead.

The driver stepped on the gas, and I sucked in a breath. The heavy rig rammed through the group of crazies like a bowling ball, only these pins left behind goo and flecks of skin.

“Holy shit,” I muttered as the trucker ran over zeds like they were nothing more than small speed bumps. The windshield wipers smeared brown streaks across the glass. He kept picking up speed, setting us up for a bull’s-eye approach to the roadblock. I braced my legs against the dash the instant before he rammed into a small car jackknifed between an SUV and a minivan. Something heavy slammed against the back of my seat, followed by a muffled moan.

I looked back to find Alan crumpled on the floor. “You okay?”

“Nnnh, yeah.”

The truck shoved the car to the side with metal-on-metal screeching. As we carved our way through the wreckage, the rig knocked around the sedan the zeds had swarmed earlier. The driver, still strapped inside, reached out to us with his only remaining arm. Even though he no longer had a face, the man watched us with unblinking eyes while his mouth opened and closed.

I shivered and turned away.

Once we broke through the bottleneck and put distance between us and the zeds, the road opened up. In the distance, a few cars entered from the next ramp, but most of the traffic was headed in the opposite direction.

I grinned. “Hot damn! We got through!”

In response, the trucker glared. “I’d be surprised if I didn’t bust something,” he growled out. “She’s not made for this sort of abuse.”

I glanced in the side mirror to see a line of vehicles following us, though the zeds were closing in on the cars on both sides. The woman in a convertible never stood a chance. I snapped my gaze straight ahead to the open highway. After a moment, I found my voice again. “What you did back there…thanks. I mean it. You saved our lives.”

He grumbled something under his breath.

The open road looked like freedom, and for the first time since getting mauled by Melanie I let myself relax. I felt halfway in control again even though I knew it was a false feeling. Too much had changed since this morning. I loved routines. I hated chaos.

Five days a week I sat in a small mushroom-colored cubicle in a sea of mushroom-colored cubicles, at the same desk I’d sat at for over five years since college. I was an actuary, which my parents thought was a pretty big deal, but really it just meant I ran a lot of reports and analyzed spreadsheets.

Two years ago, I’d saved up enough money to make a decent down payment on a fixer-upper in the Gussdale district, and most of my free time went to renovating the old bungalow. Well, to that, and flying. My Piper Cub was the one splurge I’d allowed myself after college. Dad had been a pilot, and I got my pilot’s license the same week I got my driver’s license. I rubbed my bare arm where the Cub logo tattoo—a fuzzy teddy bear—looked up at me.