The road had gone from cracked asphalt to dirt, the truck rattling like it might shake apart.
Fuck. How did we get off the main road?
Girl, your sense of direction always sucked. The voice I now identified as Lily in my head chimmed in.
"Shut up, bitch," I said aloud before I could stop myself.
My hands were locked white-knuckled on the wheel. Eli sat slumped against the window, eyes half-closed, the outline of his seatbelt cutting across his chest. The adrenaline from earlier—the men, the blood—had burned off and left only the ringing in my ears and the copper taste sliding down the back of my throat.
His neck had an ugly purple bruising in the shape of finger prints around it. A reminder of what we barely escaped. I sighed as more than once I thought lily and I should have stayed in the city in our shitty ass rat infested apartment.
We rounded a blind curve swallowed by pines.
That's when I saw him.
A man stood crooked in the middle of the lane like a nail hammered wrong. Tattered clothes hanging off a too-thin frame. Cheeks hollowed. Eyes wrong—glassy and too bright, as if they'd been polished from the inside. He lifted one arm in a jerky motion and pointed toward a leaning hand-painted sign half-hidden by brush.
GAS & FOOD — 1 MILE →
No, was my first thought.
Don't stop.
The whisper slid through the static of my mind so clean it felt like a wire pulled taut.
I blinked hard. "What?"
Don't stop, sis. Not here. She repeated.
My chest tightened. My tongue found the split on my lip and tasted iron. The man didn't move out of the lane. He just kept pointing at the sign, his mouth open like a torn pocket. I eased my foot, ready to brake—
—then his other hand twitched. Not a wave. A signal.
The brush to the right of the road breathed. Something ducked.
"Eli, put your seatbelt on."
He stirred. "What?"
"Now."
He fumbled, metal tongue of the buckle scraping the latch. I dragged my own across my shoulder so fast the webbing burned my neck.
The man's mouth stretched wider. His arm snapped again toward the sign. He wanted us to look right. To look away.
"Eyes forward," I said.
Don't stop. Breathy urgent.
I put my foot back on the gas.
The man's head cocked to the side like a bird that had forgotten how to be a bird. Yup infected. For one second, I thought he'd leap onto the hood. Instead, he stepped back and smiled with all his teeth.
Black and yellow teeth. Chipped. Jagged.
Ugh. Floss much. I thought. Lily giggled in my head. Well at least she still had her warped sense of humor.
The road unfurled into a shallow dip where shadows pooled like oil. In the hollow of those shadows—metal glinted.
Spikes.
"Shit," I hissed. "It's a trap—"
The strip stretched shoulder to shoulder, a mean grin of nails welded to chain. I could have braked, tried to slide sideways, but the pine mulch on the dirt made the surface slick, and the ditch dropped into a rock bed I didn't want to meet. The only way out was over.
"Hold on!"
I stomped the accelerator.
The truck hit the spike strip at speed. Twin pops like knuckles cracking. The front tires blew into frayed tongues of rubber. The steering wheel bucked, ripping against my palms. The hood dove, then fishtailed, the tail end slipping free, the world rotating ninety degrees.
"Lily!" Eli's voice had been small all day. Not now.
Trees flashed—green, black, green—then one came straight at us with the certainty of a hammer.
Impact.
The engine coughed its guts. The airbag punched me in the face hard enough to make me see stars. Glass pebbled across my lap and stuck to blood. The seatbelt constricted, bit, held. The truck's horn died in a strangled bleat.
Well this feels familiar. Lily interjected.
God please don't bring me back as an 8 year old boy. I thought fearfully.
Silence swelled, and in it, my heartbeat counted out what was left of my life.
"Eli." It came out hoarse. "Eli—talk to me."
He groaned. The sweetest sound I'd heard in months. "I'm here."
I tore loose, fingers slipping, and slammed my hand against his buckle. It gave. He sagged toward me, dazed but moving. Blood trickled from a cut at his hairline, beading at the tip of one eyelash before it trembled and fell.
"Does anything feel wrong?" I asked.
"My… my head. I'm dizzy."
"Stay with me."
Something tapped the glass behind his ear.
We both went still.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Not knuckles. Not a friendly hello. Nails—too long, too thick—dragging over safety glass, searching for a seam.
The smell reached us next. Not just rot. Heat and rot, a butcher's trash bin left under noon sun. Sweet and chemical at once, like sugar burned black.
"Don't move," I whispered.
Don't stop.
Ugh….obviously not Lily. I didn't intend to, but this tree here has other ideas.
Shapes slid around the edges of the headlights, not quite bodies, not quite shadows. One of them stepped into the cone of dead yellow light thrown from a surviving bulb, and any part of me that wanted to believe the man in the road had been sick instead of bait snapped.
His face had been a face once. Now it was a geography lesson in collapse. Cheek sloughed off, jaw unhinged too wide, gums receded so far the teeth looked like a grin sketched by a cruel child. His eyes had the wrong shine—fever glass, animal glass.
He pressed his palm against the spider-cracked window. His skin left a smear that fizzed where it touched the tiny shards of safety glass still embedded in the frame. He exhaled, and the window fogged with breath that smelled like stew left out for a week.
More gathered: from the brush, from behind the trunk, from the ditch. Some shuffled in jerks as though their muscles forgot what the action of movement was. Some were fast—too fast—darting short distances in lurches like they were leapfrogging their own bones. These were the newly infected. The far more dangerous.
"Lily?" Eli whispered. He clutched the bottom of his seat with one hand, the battered branch he had refused to drop earlier with the other. His knuckles had gone bone-white.
"We're okay." Lie. We were alive. That would have to be good enough. "We're going to move on three, out your side. Keep low. Don't stop. If one touches you—"
"I know," he said. And I believed him. He had learned in one day what some men never learn if their lucky in their lifetime.
I looked for my knife. It had somersaulted under the pedals on impact. I slid my hand down, palm catching on a shard of plastic, and closed around the familiar weight of the blade. The comfort that gave me shamed me and steadied me at once.
A face smashed into my window with a wet meaty thud. These almost dead infected came in types, this one was the stupid type. The glass held. The thing drew back and screamed—not a scream for help. A scream like metal complaining as it tears, layered, pig-high and machine-low. The others answered, a chorus that made the hairs on my arms stand up in a wave.
"On three," I said. "One."
Someone laughed beyond the circle of light. Not a thing. A someone. Human voices—at least three—low and hungry. The man who'd stood in the road clicked his tongue. A signal. A call to dinner. My stomach lurched in disgust.
I swallowed the sudden, stupid urge to put my face in my hands and cry.
"Two," I said, and put my palm on Eli's back so he could feel I was real.
Don't stop, sis. Not here.
"Three."
I shoved his door with my shoulder, and it barely opened, then caught on brush. I shoved again, hard enough to set my bruised ribs on fire. The door gave half a foot—enough.
Eli slipped out sideways like a fish through reeds. I slid after him, pack biting my shoulder, knife in my left hand because my right wouldn't unknot from the pain. The night hit us full in the face, wet and loud. The truck groaned as something climbed the hood and dragged nails across paint.
"Go," I said. "To the trees. Now."
We ran.