Dead & Gone

11

She scrambled out from under the car and clawed her way up the side of the vehicle until she was on her feet. Her head still swam from the fall, but her legs didn’t buckle.

Thanks for small mercies, she thought sourly.

She rose cautiously and peered over the hood of the car.

A dead child was right there. Ten feet away.

It might have been a little boy once. It was impossible to tell. There was so little of it left — just enough for the body to remain upright and the limbs to move. But clearly the hungry dead who killed him had feasted for far too long on the tiny body. A head that was more skull than face drooped on a ruined neck.

“Oh, you poor baby,” she whispered.

But even a whisper was too much.

The child’s head snapped up; the destroyed face turned toward her. All that was left of the ears were lumps of gristle, but somehow it heard her. Its shredded nose wrinkled like a dog sniffing the air.

The girl jerked back from the side of the car.

If the dead had been an adult, or even a child whose body was still mostly intact, she would have reacted differently. She knew that, even though it was too late to do anything about it.

The creature opened its lipless mouth and moaned at her.

It was a sound without form but one that was filled with meaning. A broken, bottomless cry of hunger.

Then the thing was moving toward her, colliding blindly with the fender of the car, bouncing off, trying again, moving toward her smell, edging by some crude instinct toward the front of the vehicle. Coming for her.

She would have to flee or kill it.

Indecision rooted her to the spot, chained her to the moment.

Behind her was the tank and the long road back to the empty FunMart.

In front of her were the cars.

And the shapes that she could now see moving among them. They were as pale and dusty as the cars, shambling artlessly between the dead machines, bumping into one another, crunching over bones, spent shell casings, and ancient debris.

Move, move, MOVE, you fool girl!

As abruptly as if someone had snapped fingers in front of her eyes, the spell was broken and she was moving. She put one foot onto the bumper of the car, and just as the dead child rounded the headlight and reached for her, the girl climbed quickly onto the hood, up the windshield, and onto the roof.

She sheathed her knife, pulled her slingshot out of her pocket, and seated a stone in the pouch. This was no time for knife work. From up there she could see how bad it was. How many of them there were.

At least a hundred.

No… more. Probably two or three times that number. With every second more of them tottered out of the shadows cast by wrecks or stepped out through open doors of old cars, their joints popping with a disuse twelve years in the making. Clouds of dust fell from them, having gathered inches thick over time. The girl did not have to wonder why they were still here, or why some of them had not moved in all that time. Folks called them the gray wanderers, but the truth was that most of them did not wander at all. Once they reanimated they would follow prey, but if there was no prey to follow, they would do nothing, go nowhere. They had no imagination, no drive beyond the urge to devour the living. In the absence of life they would remain where they were while the sun chased the moon across the sky, year upon year.

The girl glanced at the desert that ran beside the road. She could run, but that was a temporary solution. The dead could see her more easily out in the open, and so could the reapers. She would be like a bug on a white sheet. Here among the cars she had cover, and she could climb over the vehicles far faster and more easily than they could. Neither choice was a perfect solution. Each held its own advantages and offered its own complications.

The ones closest to her moaned with their pitiful dry voices.

One, a tall man in the rags of a set of blue coveralls, lunged at her, but she crouched and spun, drawing the slingshot tight and loosing a stone. It struck him in the forehead hard enough to snap his head backward and send him sprawling into the arms of the other dead. He struggled to grab her even as he fell beneath their relentless feet.

“Move!” she yelled, and the sound of her own voice was the whip that made her run to the end of the car and leap across the distance to the next one. She landed with a hard thump, her slight weight denting the hood, her thighs flexing to take the impact, arms pumping for balance. She ran and jumped, ran and jumped, as wax-white hands reached for her. Dry fingertips scraped along her calves as she leaped over their heads.

She fired stone after stone, knocking some of them back, knocking a few down, clearing a path. It was hard work, though, and with every step, every pull on the slingshot, every leap, her energy was flagging. And there were two miles of cars in front of her.

As she ran, she heard a strange mewling cry and realized with horror that she was making the sound. A whimper, like a whipped dog might make.

Shut your gob and run!

The next vehicle was a pickup truck, and she leaped high and hard to clear the outer edge of the bed. Her left foot made it with half an inch to spare, but her right was half an inch too low, and the girl suddenly pitched forward and down into the truck bed. It had a black rubber liner, but it felt like iron as she struck. She tried to tuck and roll, but she banged her shoulder against the far side.

Immediately gray arms reached over the metal bay toward her.

“No!” she shrieked, trying to shrink back from the withered flesh and clawing fingers. But they crowded around the truck, reaching, reaching.

Fireflies of pain danced in her eyes. Lying there on her back, she dug out stone after stone and fired her slingshot. One dead face rocked back, and then another spun away with a shattered jaw, and a third toppled backward with one eye suddenly blown dark by a stony missile. She fired eight stones, ten, fourteen…

She had to keep firing.

She didn’t even have the chance to get up.

She dug into her pouch for another stone. And another…

Then her scrabbling fingers found only empty leather. The pouch was empty.

The girl flung the slingshot down, tore the knife from her sheath, and began chopping at the hands, cutting dry tendons, filling the air with fingers that twitched like white worms.

And all the time she screamed.

With a last desperate howl of mingled terror and rage, the girl swung her legs up and over her head and back-rolled to her feet with her spine hard against the rear window of the truck. The dead climbed up, scaling the truck by clambering over one another as they sought to tear her apart.

The girl crouched there, teeth bared in a feral snarl of final defiance, one hand balled into a fist, the other locked iron-tight around the knife, ready to fight all the way to her last screaming breath.

“Come on—come ON!” she bellowed.

And that was when the siren went off.