Hissers (20 page)

As they approached the middle of the bridge, Seth thought he saw something move down below in the riverbed, a glint of pale skin among the dark black weeds. He squinted again to be sure but saw nothing.
A boulder,
he wondered. Or maybe just a momentary reflection of the silver dollar moon off the turgid rivulet that was the mighty Jefferson.

The SUV stopped. Connor cursed God, Nicole and Amanita each expressed frustration with expletives. Seth turned his attention from the river bed, glanced out the windshield, and saw the wall of cars blocking their way. A small fire licked the very bottom of the pile up. Connor let the vehicle drive right up to the façade, let the bumper tap the twisted metal before them.

All of them looked through the windshield of a small Honda Accord that was standing upright on its front bumper.

A woman was staring back at them, face pressed to the glass, her bottom jaw hanging down, a seatbelt still wound around her shoulder. She was frozen in a state of surprise, and Seth almost thought she would burst out laughing but for the fact bits of her brain had oozed out of her ears and stuck to the sides of her face.

Crushed upon impact,
he thought.
It’s almost better than what we’re dealing with.

Nicole turned away. “Please back up, Connor.”

“Sorry.” He backed the car up until the mud lights no longer cast their orange glow over the woman.

“Now what?” Amanita asked. She rolled the window down a crack and lit a cigarette. Seth looked at her, wanted to tell her where to stick those damn smokes, but caught the glimmer of tears in her eyes and decided to let it go. She wouldn’t let the tears fall, kept fighting them back. She was a tough girl, and in the sickly light from the tiny fire, a very attractive one. It was too bad he wanted to punch her in the mouth all the time.

“We can either get out and climb over it,” Connor suggested, “or we go back into town, try to get out on the state road. I honestly don’t know which one is safer.”

Seth knew. Knew because he’d played enough horror games in his time to know you took your chances with a vehicle. The SUV may not have had a gun turret attached to the top, but it was big and had weight and could run people down. It had already saved them enough as it is.

“We could climb over and find a car on the other side,” Amanita suggested.

“I’m not walking around out there,” Nicole said. “All of these cars are done for and what if we don’t find one that works? Then we’ll be toast. Not to mention anything could be waiting for us on the other side.”

“We could send someone over to check real fast. If there’s nothing there then come right back.”

“No offence, Am,” Seth said, realizing it was the first time he’d called her by her nickname, “but unless you want to be the volunteer, I think that’s a shitty plan.”

“You’re a shitty plan.”

“Good comeback.”

“Eat a dick.”

“I thought you two were done fighting,” Nicole said.

“I’m done when he eats a dick.”

“Fine,” Seth said, “I’ll eat anything to get you to shut up.”

“I’ll go over,” Connor said. He was looking up through the windshield as if gauging how fast he could scale the cars.

Nicole shook her head. “No way. You are not going off on your own again. Nobody is. If we have to go back to get the state road then we go back.”

Seth knew, as he presumed everyone did, that Nicole wanted one more chance to look for her mother. And while Seth was on board for this as well, he certainly didn’t like the idea of going back into the wasps nest.

“Okay,” Connor said, backing up, “We’ll try 134. Let’s pray we even make it there to check.”

Sunday, 12:18

The drive back toward town was like viewing a time lapse photograph in a museum. What had once been small town USA was now a kinetically crumbling ghost town: car headlights burning out in front of twisted bumpers, cracked storefront windows falling from their frames, burning paper skipping across roads to light small patches of weeds on fire. Entropy in motion, Nicole thought. A town succumbing to a virus.

She risked a look at Connor, saw his eyes on her before they darted away. What would have happened between them had this night not gone the way it had. Would he have come to Jason Drake’s party? Would they have kissed?

He looked at her again, their eyes definitely meeting this time, but he looked away embarrassed.

“Is there an easier way around the crash site?” She hoped having something real to discuss would ameliorate the awkward connection they were creating in the front seat. “I don’t think driving near the plane is a good idea.”

He shook his head. “Maybe. Only way onto 134 is by the supermarket. I can maybe cut across the soccer fields and go wide of the plane, cut through the parking lot and back onto the road. Sort of how we came down from the fort.”

“If we go into the fields we’ll be sitting ducks,” Seth said. “Unless this thing has good traction on grass.”

“I’ll kill all the lights, stay away from the road, go real slow. Maybe we can get across it without being seen.”

“We’re almost on E,” Amanita said. “Do we want to waste the gas?”

“Going slow actually preserves the gas,” Nicole said. “Its burning time is exponentially linked to the car’s speed. The faster you go the quicker you burn through the gas, and vice versa. That’s why my mom always drives so slow.” She caught that familiar look in Amanita’s eye, the one that said
thanks for making me look stupid, Brainiac.
“Or we could go fast,” she continued, desperate as always to not be the smart one, “and just worry about it once we’re on the state road.”

Just then the orange gas light came on, catching everyone’s attention. Nicole thought there ought to be a laugh track accompanying it.

“Cars have reserve tanks, right? I mean they last like another ten miles or something?” Connor asked. At first he looked at Seth but the boy just shrugged, a silent acknowledgment that video game designers had not thought of that little detail in their racing games. Which left Nicole one again providing answers. “Typical SUV tanks can go near twenty miles once the reserve light is on. Maybe a few more on just fumes.”

He thinks I’m just brains. He doesn’t look at me the way the boys look at Am.

“Good enough. I’m going to get off this main road, try to stay hidden. I can hear those things somewhere up ahead.”

Nicole could, too. They all could.

Sunday, 12:23

The park’s fields were so black they looked like giant holes in the earth, pits descending into the Satan’s War Room. Perhaps this was where the creatures had come from, clawing their way up a rock-faced fissure in the Earth’s crust that opened when the plane impacted. Maybe more were still on their way?

Connor closed his eyes and let them readjust to reality. The dark pits were just grass, nothing more.

He killed the mud lights and dimmed the interior dash lights upon Nicole’s suggestion. She was acting weird, like she was afraid to talk. Still worried about her mom, he figured. They all were. They hadn’t run theirs over.

He drove the SUV into the dirt parking lot and then up over the small curb onto the nearest field. The low crunch of gravel became a shallow swish as the tires cut across the grass. He followed the edge out toward the second smaller field, this one for the pee wee players.

“Holy crap, look at that,” Amanita said.

Back beyond the parking lot, they could see the dark gray smoke of the crash climbing over the trees into the purple sky. A small fire still burned low to the ground. The emergency lights of several dozen abandoned police cruisers and fire trucks cut through the trees with intense purpose, a bright fireworks show for the new independence of the living dead.

“Lookout!” Nicole yelled.

Connor saw the creature crawling on the ground in front of them, like a giant black slug. He accelerated to run it over.

It yelled in challenge. “C’mon!”

Connor spun the wheel at the last second, realizing this was not a hisser. The SUV’s tires slid in the grass and the vehicle fishtailed to the right, narrowly missing the black form on the ground by inches.

“You heard him, right?” Nicole asked. “Not one of those things.”

“Yeah. He looks hurt. Maybe we can get him in the back. Do the seats fold down?”

“It could be a trick,” Seth offered. He was holding a large kitchen knife now. Next to him, Amanita wielded a meat cleaver. Jesus, they needed guns.

“How so?”

“Maybe those things can talk. Maybe they’ve known how to all along. Or maybe they’re learning. Think about it, we haven’t discussed the idea yet but we shouldn’t ignore the possibility.”

“He’s got a point.” Amanita picked at the cut on her forehead. “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with him but it could be true.”

Connor looked back out the windshield at the form on the ground, now ten yards away. The man’s faint moans were audible over the SUV’s running engine. “Take a picture, why don’t ya.” This was followed by a dramatic and loud moan, like a man who wants attention in an ER. But in this case Connor knew it had to be true. There was no denying what they’d witnessed so far.

“Okay, we all go,” he said. “Seth, you and Amanita flank him on the left, Nicole and I will take him on the right. If he makes one funny move we bash him and get back in the car. I’ll leave it running just in case.”

“Leave the door open, too,” Seth added.

All four teens stepped out of the SUV, each one brandishing a homemade weapon. Seth and Am still carrying their cutlery, Connor now carrying a table leg, and Nicole a short metal pipe that had once been part of a broken heating vent in her living room.

They strode forward with arms raised, each one poised to strike at the slightest nefarious motion.

“What you gonna do,” the slithering man said as he rolled over on his back and revealed a chest wound large enough to put a fist in. “Break my bones? You see these legs, I’m not gonna run anywhere, least of all at you. You see this arm? Limp like a whiskey drinker’s dick. And in case you didn’t notice the hole here… Put down those fucking things and c’mere. Hurry.”

Sunday, 12:25

Lieutenant General Winston W. Davis did not fear much of anything in life, least of all death. He had served in The Gulf War, fought insurgents in Somalia, had taken two AK47 rounds in the calf in Bosnia—both passing straight through the muscle, thank God—and led four strategic raids on arms caches of known Al-Qaeda supporters in Iraq during the first of his two tours in that sand pit of hell.

In every engagement he’d killed a man, watched as pure shock and terror twisted their faces just before his bullets enter their hearts. He learned a lesson not taught in any manuals or training exercises, but in the field—you overcome death by
becoming
it.

The powers that be had taken him out of action in 2003, against his request, and stuck him back in the real world where his wife now proudly showed off her cell phone skills by calling him every hour on the hour. After twenty five years of marriage he still loved her, but not unlike the way he loved a perfect crease in his slacks. You admired it for a second, touched it for good measure, and then moved on with your day. There was no need to tell it where you were having lunch.

In the stack of notes he’d been keeping since his training at Paris Island, his memoirs as it were, there was but one mention of ever succumbing to the ultimate fear of death.

In Bosnia, along the Drina River on a routine information collection run which put him in charge of seven young men, a bullet came out of the woods and hit the young boy from Indiana they called Swig, coring a hole through the middle of his neck. The boy fell immediately to the ground, pleading for Winston to save him, but there was no hope and even the boy knew this. Winston ordered his men into the woods to find the gunman, himself following behind six adrenaline-charged marines that snuck from skinny, bare tree to skinny, bare tree. Dead leaves crunched underfoot, his breath steamed in front of him, he could smell the fuzzy, gray moss growing on the weathered tree trunks surrounding him. Visibility through the frosted pines and barren fruit trees was still good as the pink sun fell behind the hill they maneuvered up, ushering in the cold Bosnian night.

He would never recall exactly how he strayed too far from his men for those few seconds. Perhaps they were too intent on attacking their aggressors and sprinted forward, forgetting about maintaining a line of sight. He was suddenly all alone.

A man walked out from a nearby tree, dressed in rags. His beard was frosted like the pine needles of the trees. Some kind of broken bone jutted out from his neck, yet the skin looked to have grown back around it. His gaunt face looked at Winston curiously with solid, jet black eyes, and disappeared behind the next tree in his path. Winston trained his gun and waited for the man to appear on the other side of the trunk. It was only a foot in diameter. He should have showed on the next side almost immediately, before his shoulders even passed out of sight. But the man never returned. Like in those old cartoons where an elephant hides behind an umbrella. Winston ran to the trunk and swung his gun around. There was no one there.
No one anywhere.