Evolution of the Dead (6 page)

“Fuck him.  He deserves to die.”

“I got to at least try.”

Scott slammed on the brakes.  The car went skidding sideways in the overgrown street.  “Ok.  See ya.”  He reached in front of her and shoved her door open.

Shocked, she looked at him, her mouth open.  “You’re not gonna
help
me? You’re gonna push me out into that shit?”

He said, “Your
hubby
is
not
my problem.  If you wanna go hunting for his ass then you’re on your own! I have my own family to worry about.”

“Well I wasn’t your problem either but you sure helped
me
get out of here.”

He let out a short laugh.  “We’re not quite out yet and I’m not gonna go backtracking into that shit to look for your abusive fucking husband!”

Kim turned in her seat to look out the back window.  Cars were overturned.  Water was spraying out of broken fire hydrants.  Puke and shit covered everything.  Dead people stood here and there reaching for them.  A woman on the side of the street spewed a continuous stream of vomit at them.  It splashed on the ground behind their car.

“Yeah,” she said, turning back around.  “Fuck him.  He’s dead already anyway.”

They sped out of downtown.

With synched sighs of relief, Carmen and Maria finally found a clear path leaving downtown.

Maria was crying over the loss of her husband as she drove, wiping tears from her eyes with her palm.

Carmen sat on the passenger side, her hand on her bare knee.  The pain in her broken foot was screaming up at her in a biting ache.  She wished she had at
least
some
aspirin to take the edge off.  Looking out the window, her eyes darted back and forth along the side of the highway expecting a corpse to jump out of the bushes or from behind a car.

Please, I don’t want any more bad feelings
, she thought. 
It’s already bad enough.  No more.

Maria asked with a sniffle, “Where should we go?”

“Just head south.  Stay on the highway."

They came up to a traffic jam.  Flustered, Maria asked, “God, now what?”

“They didn’t make it very far,” Carmen said quietly under her breath.  “These are the people that sped away when the infection hit.”

Several of the dead came walking out from behind some of the cars, their arms outstretched.

Alarmed, Maria asked, “Do we back up?”

“No, take the onramp.  There’s a Rent-A-Center up there.”

“A
Rent-A-
Center? What do we need from there?”

The onramp led up to a frontage road full of more crashed vehicles and more of the dead.  They stood on the side of the road in front of the severely damaged Rent-A-Center.  A fire truck had crashed through the front of the building.

Carmen took in a deep breath, shocked.  She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.  She said, “Park along the front here.”

“Why do you want to stop
here
? We need to get out of here! We need to
go
!”

“I
work
here,” Carmen said calmly.  “There’s some trucks in the warehouse we can use as barricades.  We can block ourselves in somewhere so none of these fuckers can get close enough to touch us or puke on us.”

“No! We need to get out of here! I don’t want to barricade myself in
anywhere
.”

“Listen…what’s your name?”

“Maria.”

“Maria.  I don’t think we’re going to be able to get out of town.  I’m betting most of the roads are unpassable, and I don’t think walking out there is going to do us any good – especially with my broken foot.”

Maria sighed, giving in.  “Ok.  Ok.  What are we going to do?”

“Park next to the Rent-A-Center.”

She pulled up next to the building.  “Ok. Now what?”

“You need to find the keys to the trucks.  They should be in the manager’s office.  Hopefully it’s not locked.”

“We could break the door down.”

“No,
you’ll
have to.  I have a broken foot, remember?”

“Oh shit.  My mind is so fucked up right now.”  Her hand thumped on the steering wheel.

“You’re gonna have to go in there and get the keys for the trucks and then move all of them.”

“I don’t know how to drive a
delivery
truck!”

“It’s an automatic just like a car.  It’s just a little bigger.”

“I don’t think I can do it...”

“Maria, you have to.  We don’t have much time, look.”  Carmen pointed down the street.  A larger group of the dead was moving toward their car.  A man near the front of the group was wearing a bloody fireman’s coat.  He threw up in a steady stream as he moved toward them.  A worm was growing out the side of his face.

“Oh Jesus, I don’t think I can do this.”

“You have to.”

Cautiously, Maria opened her door.  Stepping out of the car she asked, “
Where
are the keys?”

“They’re in the manager’s office.  It’s straight through to the back of the store.  It’ll be your first door on the right as you pass the main counter.”

“I wish you could walk.”

“Believe me, if I could, I would be
running
right now.  Please hurry!”

Maria closed the car door.  Walking through the broken glass she disappeared into the store.

Carmen pushed the auto lock button on the door’s armrest.  She slid down in the passenger seat. 
Hopefully they won’t see me
, she thought.

Inside, the store was a wreck.  Furniture had been thrown everywhere from the impact of the fire truck.  Going around the side of it she had to step around a pool of vomit with billions of tiny worms layering the glass covered floor.

“Oh I can’t do this,” she cried, putting her hands to her face.  “I just
can’t
do this.  I deserve to die too.  I can’t do this without you, Matt.”

On the ground, the worms leaned toward her as she stood there.  Some were inches away from touching the toe of her tennis shoe.

A few seconds later she gathered her wits again, remembering the hurt girl outside was still in the car waiting for her.  Maria took long steps, slowly maneuvering around the worms, watching her foot placement past the front counter.

She whispered, “The first right
past
the counter.”

Approaching the manager’s office, she found the door closed.  Shattered glass littered the carpet even back here.  Some small pieces had even leaned against the walls.  A picture hung crooked on a paneled wall.

The handle on the door was clean.  There was no puke on it or on the floor.

Carefully, she opened the door.

As she did, a peeling yellow hand reached out of the darkness to touch her.

Slowly driving through a tangled traffic jam on the highway, Nick said softly “It doesn’t look like people got very far.”

“No.  It doesn’t.”

The road was crisscrossed with streaks of vomit.

“They must’ve driven out of downtown after they got infected or whatever it is and then crashed when the pain got to be too much.”

Janet said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Sorry.”

She started crying again.

“We’ll uh…” Nick started.  “We’ll figure something out, ok?”

She nodded sniffling.

Awkwardly he asked “What’s your name?”

“Janet Williams.”

“I’m Nick Carson.”

Suddenly, Janet hollered, “Go up that onramp, right
there
!
It looks clear!”

At the top they were met by another wall of the dead.  They had gathered around a car parked next to the front of a shattered Rent-A-Center.

Janet shouted, “Go around them!”

Passing, Nick glanced at the car surrounded by the dead.  Through their standing bodies he saw a girl crouching down in the front seat.

“There’s someone alive in there,” he said.  “They have her trapped.”

“Better her than
us
,” Janet shouted.  “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

“She needs help! I can’t just
leave
her there.”

“Oh I can,” Janet said matter-of-factly.

Ignoring her, Nick sped past the car with the girl trapped inside.  At forty miles an hour, he stomped the brakes while turning the steering wheel hard to the right.  This caused his car to do a quick 180 spin.  Impressed; but more surprised that he actually was able to pull it off, he pounded on the gas, speeding towards the dead surrounding the trapped girl’s car.  He slammed into them throwing bodies up into the air.  He jumped on the brakes, rolled down the window and shouted “Get in here! Quick!”

Having watched the whole thing from inside the car, Carmen slid over the center console, threw the driver’s side door open, reached across the vomit covered pavement and opened the back driver’s side door of Nick’s car.  Painfully she stood up on the floorboard next to the driver’s seat and stretched her other leg out over the fouled pavement where her foot touched the floorboard of the back seat of Nick’s car.

Nick noticed Carmen wasn’t wearing any clothes.  She had peed her underwear a little bit.

“Thanks,” she said as she eased down into the back seat.  She slammed the door shut.

Nick sped away from the mangled group.  He asked “You’re not one of those
things
are you?”

Out of breath Carmen answered, “No I have a broken foot and that hurt like a son of a bitch.”

“I seen piss on your underwear.”

“Like I said,” Carmen said as she leaned forward, noticing Nick’s long blonde hair. “That hurt like hell.  Sorry, but I pissed myself.”

“It’s alright,” he said.  “Just as long as you don’t got any of that infected shit.”

“I’m good.  Can you go back to the store, please?”

Janet turned in her seat.  “We ain’t goin back into
that
!”

“My friend’s in there,” Carmen nearly shouted.  “She’s still in there!”

Nick slowed his car.  “Shit, she’s probably dead.  I don't want to go back after her without knowing for sure if she’s alive.”

Carmen yelled “She just went in there! She was getting keys for the trucks.”

Janet was staring at her.  “
What
trucks?”

“The rental trucks! I wanted to set up a barricade with them.”

“A barricade for what?” Janet asked.

“To block the dead people.  I thought we could park them somewhere and block ourselves in so they couldn’t reach us.”

“You mean like on that bridge there?” Janet asked as she turned back in her seat pointing to the bridge that the fire truck had sped across minutes before.

“Yes,
just
like that.”

“I see what you’re trying to do,” Nick said, “but I don't think it'll work.”

“
I
don’t get it,” Janet said.

“She wants to park the trucks on the bridge and block off either end so no one can get in the middle...”

“Yeah the trucks would have to block the whole road,” Carmen interrupted.  “I was thinking about parking them nose to nose on either end of the bridge.  Then we’d park a third one with the rear of the truck backed into the noses of the other two like a T.”

“There wouldn't be enough time to do all that!” Janet said.  “Not with three people.”

“Four,” Carmen said quickly.  “Maria's inside getting the keys, remember?”

Nick asked, “Where are the trucks?”

“In the warehouse in the back of the store.”

“And the keys are?”

“In the office. Maria should have them by now.”

“Ok, let's do it,” Nick agreed.  “But we gotta be quick.  Real quick.”  Stomping the gas he drove back to the front of the Rent-A-Center.

“Explain this a little better so I understand, because I see what you’re saying, but wouldn’t it be hard to park the trucks like that? They’d be too big to get turned just right.”

Nick said “We’d have to use the third truck to push another truck in further.  They’d look like a T, like she said.  The top of the T would be two trucks parked nose to nose, the bottom of the T would be one truck facing away from the other two."

“Yes, exactly.  And there would be a T on the other end of the bridge too with the other three trucks,” Carmen added.

“Well, we need to do this fast,” Nick said.  “Let’s go, Janet.”

“I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” Janet said, her eyes wide.  “What if we get caught? What if there’s a bunch of those things inside? Come on, Nick, let’s just keep going.”