Tarah took the lead as I struggled with Aggrodol’s increasing side effects. Three of my five senses impaired me somehow: a shimmering mirage-like effect waved across my vision, growing from shadows swimming along the periphery in the morning into washes of white encroaching on the center like spilled paint by dinnertime, like an increasing penalty. My hearing was over-sensitive, the rustling of leaves loud like a chorus of applause…our stomping footsteps sure invitations for an attack, no matter how light our step. I was chilly in the sun and hot in the shade, soon learning that wearing layers helped regulate my erratic inner thermostat. Of course, with my luck, I was still able to smell the ubiquitous rotting flesh and burning infrastructure as well as tasted the sodium-loaded food out of pouches and cans.
Shortly after leaving the office building where we split up the group, Tarah and I reached an intersection where she suddenly stopped. I nearly ran into her, except when her brown hat appeared in my vision like a floating omen.
“Would you please say something before stopping on a dime?” I asked, a smirk rising across my lips. “I was just having an inner monologue about how I can barely see and you’re throwing yourself across my path like a strip of road spikes.”
“Sorry, but your sight…or lack of…is not my fault. And I’m the one clearing the path for you, thank you very much.”
“You’re acting like you’re whacking away at the jungle with a machete for us.”
“I wish I had a machete right now…but not for the jungle.”
I smiled. “You’re making me miss Sam taking the point.”
“Me, too. Up front, he was an easy target. Revs always go after the people they see first. It’s like an obsessive compulsive disorder, except for killing things.” Then she held a hand up. “Listen…you hear that?”
“I’m hearing all kinds of things,” I whispered. “What are we listening for?”
“There’s a bell going off. The metal kind, like an old school bell at recess.”
“OK? The noise could be good cover if it’s attracting a bunch of goons.”
“Maybe. Keep your eyes open…oh, I forgot. I have to see for your sorry ass, too.”
We moved to the corner of the next building, the bell growing more distinct and shrill, clanging away like a bank under eternal robbery. Tarah spotted a school three blocks down on the left, surrounded by a mob of revenants pounding on the brick walls like barbarians at the gate. The school, with its old-style windows covered by white-painted plywood, looked as though it had been vacant for some time, but the alarm had activated and suddenly, it was the place to be for any revs within earshot. We couldn’t have asked for a better distraction moving through the neighborhood.
Tarah kept ahead until we stopped at the corner. “Looks like there’s a park ahead but not much cover…same thing if we head west up the street and then turn south. The road signs say the interstate’s coming up, so there’s only open road around here…lots of concrete but not much cover.”
I peered through the haze at a rectangular shape in the background that revealed few details to me. “What about that building a block down?”
She eyed me suspiciously. “You want to head closer to the revs?”
“They’re still a block away from there. At least we’ll have some cover…and if we’re spotted, a head start.”
“And what about stragglers coming late to the party? We could end up the meat in the middle of a shit sandwich.”
“All right, let’s not gross ourselves out.” I turned my attention to a bright yellow school bus that even my sight couldn’t miss. “See that bus in the parking lot over there? Wanna head that way instead?”
“All right. Keep quiet, follow me, and we’ll get there.”
We headed to a grassy lot across the street that lead us to the next intersection. We reached the bus and I realized that it wasn’t parked in a parking space at all but stopped in the middle of the street, as though frozen in time. Or, more likely, abandoned in a hurry. We made our way carefully around the front of the bus and stopped at the open door opposite the driver’s seat. The tinted windows were dark, the inside eerily quiet.
I looked at Tarah looking back at me, waiting for something. “What.”
“Peek your head inside and make sure nothing’s in there.”
“You go peek your head in there. It could be a hornet’s nest waiting for a poking stick.”
She shook her head with over-dramatic disgust and stepped lightly, just high enough on the stairway to look around the inside corner, keeping her head close to the hard rubber floor. Then she backed out without a sound.
“There’s some blood under the seats, but nothing else.”
“Maybe the driver quit because he found a new lease on life. I don’t see any keys so let’s keep going. I’m not sure I’d want to make a whole lot of noise out here, as it is. It feels like the calm before a storm.”
***
Tarah was right about the junction. In my second observational error of the day, the grassy lot I’d thought was a park turned out to be a median, as three surface streets merged to link with the interstate. Cheers to my eyesight…as dependable as a broken clock. There wasn’t much else other than cracked concrete, a grassy median, and metal lamp posts softly creaking in the breeze, providing extra creepiness to the already-odd silence of abandoned property and empty public commons.
We reached an overpass and found the road ahead expanding to eight lanes, a median lined with pine trees split down the middle. This provided a reassuring sixty feet of clearance on each side, limiting the opportunity for an ambush from the tree line on either shoulder. We traveled that way for a few miles until the area opened back up to strip malls, banks, and gas stations at another major intersection, this one piled up with smashed vehicles. We sensed movement in the area and slowed to a listening pace.
Directly ahead, a maroon SUV sat on deflated front tires, nose-deep in the rear of a white Dodge minivan, alive with writhing bodies on the other side of its collapsed rear door. We crept past until Tarah held out her arm to stop me. She nodded to the median ahead, on our side of the intersection.
“That first lamppost…see it?”
I looked up and saw an undead pedestrian pinned under a large metal signal box that had fallen from the top of the pole after an a black sedan had struck it. The revenant writhed under the box as though suspended in space, gray-skinned extremities flailing away at the ether in an eternal tantrum.
“It doesn’t look like much of a threat,” I said. “Take it out or leave it be?”
“Too noisy to take it out. All these crashed cars had drivers and some had passengers. How many more revs do you think are in that pile-up, besides the ones we’ve already seen?”
“If that’s the case, let’s just go around the whole thing.” I looked about us, as though I could see more than fifty feet. Any direction could take us off a cliff and I’d be none the wiser. “Right or left?”
Tarah looked around. “Left, towards the Big Saver.”
I squinted ahead until my vision caught the shopping center. Its sign focused to read: “Big Saver Market. Now Hiring.”
We turned ninety degrees across the median to the next set of lanes, keeping our distance from the pinned pedestrian. From that side, we crossed at the crosswalk before hissing from dead lungs filled the air and we spotted a revenant at the far end of the car line, partially hidden by the high profile of a black SUV. A stray shopping cart rested against the SUV’s rear wheel. The curious rev stepped forward and collided with the cart, sending a metallic clatter across the quiet intersection, and the area sprang to life. Decaying heads peeked out from car windows and corpses rose from resting places among the detritus, necks twisting to home in on the location of the noise like hungry bats searching for mosquitoes.
We ran to the Big Saver’s parking lot and reached the first cart corral before spotting several more revs winding their way through orderly rows of abandoned cars, as though trying to find their own.
“Can’t go that way,” said Tarah. “Let’s try going around from inside the store and out the far exit. Maybe we can trip ‘em up inside somehow.”
“Somehow,” I echoed. “There’s some wishful thinking afoot.”
“Do you want my afoot up your ass? Let’s go.”
The Big Saver’s automatic door slid open with a whisper at our presence, electricity still running the sensors. The store looked fully operational, with bright lights and bland pop music over the PA system, but no one seemed to be inside. Tarah pushed on a line of carts stacked for shoppers. “Come help me!” she yelled between huffs and puffs. We pushed the carts across the entrance, revenants slamming up against them with a crash, falling and then climbing all over each other trying to return to their charge.
Tarah’s quick thinking with the obstacle bought us some time. We passed through the vestibule to another set of doors and entered the sales floor, our eyes scanning empty checkout lanes for anything moving toward the discord we were causing at the front entrance. A glimpse of movement close to the floor at the self-checkout lane caught my eye, followed by the swish of it rubbing against something as it zipped away. I moved closer, gripping my spear.
“What is it?” Tarah whispered from over my shoulder.
I continued down the aisle and turned down another where coolers for beer and shelves of liquor and wine lined their respective sides. A flatbed pushcart stood nearby with a pallet of wine boxes stacked on top, some boxes toppled to the floor, leaking from within. And whatever was lurking was hiding behind it.
I pivoted on one foot and leaned around the cart, my spear pointed straight ahead in a stabbing position. I heard hissing and looked down. Backed between the wall of the cooler and the back corner of the cart was a fat opossum, standing on its hind legs voicing its displeasure at my harassment. Its babies climbed around its white fur like sloths on cecropia trees.
I exhaled, relieved. “It looks like they’ll let anything in this place. Ever hear of ‘No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service?’”
“No dice. She must’ve let herself in through the automatic doors. This place would heaven for a mama ‘possum.”
I backed away, hoping the animal’s unsettling hisses would subside with my retreat. “We’ll leave ‘er be. They eat ticks.”
“Did you learn that at pub trivia? Let’s get going before those revs figure out how to climb over the carts.”
We moved to the outside of the row of registers at the front of the store, glancing down every aisle as we passed. I gazed at the rows of untouched food, wishing we could grab a few things, but most of the food was just processed junk and at that moment, we were the store’s main attraction. I wanted to reverse that dynamic right away.
We reached the other side’s exit and found the automatic door propped open by an overturned cart, every attempt to close itself futile. We passed through and hurried away from the chaos still churning on the opposite side of the building.
We found ourselves in a strip mall containing a coffee shop, nail salon, and barber shop. Instead of heading along the storefronts and away from the road we’d detoured from, we continued south across the street and moved a block over—along the brick walls of an office building—until we came to an alleyway that separated the building from the pastry shop next door. We took the alley west and wound up back south, the noise from the parking lot still echoing through the area. I almost felt bad for any revs who entered the store and confronted a pissed-off mama opossum. Almost.
***
We approached a gas station that was in mid-loot, with a small group of civilians shooting their way through a group of revs with a couple of well-positioned large caliber guns that covered four sides of the block. I hadn’t expected to see so many people around—even working cooperatively—though it still looked to be a ragtag operation. After a wild-looking teenager ran by and fiddled with the gas pumps while pipe bombs rolled out of the bag at his feet, we quickened our pace away from the scene.
Another kid whizzed by on a bike before stopping to adjust a cloth pack strapped to the handlebars.
“What’s going on here?” Tarah asked. “What are you doing?”
“We’re setting a trap for the revs. We’re gonna blow this station up and shoot down any of ‘em coming to check it out.”
I heard pleasure in his tone while he described their destructive plan and felt a knot in my stomach. “We should keep moving. Too much could go wrong and we’re too close.”
A few seconds of muffled shouting behind us dulled our conversation, followed by a tremendous explosion that sent us running for cover in the parking lot of a Fiat dealership, keeping low among the small vehicles as humans ran from the scene and revs ran for it. I looked through car windows and over hoods, hoping to see trouble before it saw us. People and things ran with the smoke and the trash blowing down the street, heading to predetermined destinations even if it looked like they’d seen us. We wanted to wait for the chaos to subside, but the situation only escalated as the uncontrolled fire spread to neighboring buildings and vehicles, creating more explosions and more chaos throughout the area. Black smoke pulsed from over the tops of buildings and the fires grew so large, I could feel the rising air temperature and broke a sweat.
I looked at the new cars inside the showroom like a window shopper. Several models lined up along the sales floor—sleek and new—noses pointed at the street, stickers in the windows.
“We could take our pick from any of these,” I said. “Should we ride into Bridgeport in luxury? European-style, with pinkie fingers extended?”
“You know they don’t keep the keys in the ignition, right?”
“Hmm…that’s weird. Even for Europe.”
“Not Europe, in this dealership.”
“Don’t they keep the keys in a lock box somewhere?”
“Do you want to get out of here, or do you want to fuck around in here?”
“I’m just trying to make things a little easier for us. Have you ever sat on heated leather seats?”
“Not in the middle of July. Let’s go, Neil!”
Chapter Eighteen
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