Part 6 (1/2)

Dejah shook her head. A small smear of blood dribbled over her cheek, but she didn't feel any pain so she couldn't tell its origin. The Pathfinder stopped driver's side to the ground. She unlatched the seatbelt and crawled up to escape through the pa.s.senger's side door.

As she emerged into the cool air, she smelled the scents of fuel, rubber, and something burning. There was even the vague smell of rot. Decay. She tried not to think of how long some of these corpses must have been here.

Cripes how long had it been this way? No longer than a few days, right? How did it get so bad so fast?

The black Ford F150 bounced down the hill twenty yards away and smashed headlong into three other vehicles, stirring the wreckage, adding a piece to the puzzle of confusion that anyone trying to drive this highway would have to solve.

She winced at the wreck, then surveyed the length of Interstate. There was nothing but chaos in both directions. You'd need a freakin' tank to drive anywhere on this road now.

Along with the cars around her, there were seven or eight bodies draped over hoods and trunks nearby, still more hunched over steering wheels or hanging out of opened doors, others sprawled on the road. She looked toward the mall, but could no longer see the group of people who'd been attacked. Surely there was safety in numbers, but large groups were also large targets.

Scanning her surroundings, she smelled gas and something burning, but she didn't see any smoke or fire. Her eyes locked onto a potential hope for salvation: a white Arlington Police cruiser with flas.h.i.+ng lights sandwiched between two cars not 50-feet away from her Pathfinder. She couldn't see if the officer was inside, but she knew it was a good bet she'd find a weapon and a means of communication.

My phone.

She hurried back to the Pathfinder and climbed in through the back window, frantically searching until she found her phone. She breathed a sigh of relief as she slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.

She walked down the bank and weaved her way across the road toward the police cruiser.

Dejah maneuvered around several wrecks and abandoned vehicles, deliberately not looking inside to avoid the dead gazes of their former drivers. As she approached the rear of the patrol car, she saw the shape of a man in the driver's seat. She paused, unsure if she should hide, but the goal was to get inside his car even better if he was alive and could protect her. Never mind the fact he was in the same fix ... at least he was trained to deal with this sort of thing. Well, not that anyone was really trained to deal with this sort of thing.

She approached the back of the car with her hands in the air. She wasn't sure why, but she guessed the demonstration was to show him she wasn't armed, and didn't intend to do anything unreasonable. She zeroed in on a rifle attached to a rack above the back seat divider.

”Officer?” she called. ”Are you okay? I need some help.” She came around the driver's side of the car. The officer had dark hair and looked sick. She could see the profile of the left side of his face. He looked pale but not infected ...not like them. ”Officer?”

She approached the door. He seemed oblivious to her, but then, as she came in line with the window, he turned toward her, opening his door. Dejah stepped backward. Her breath caught in her lungs.

Half of the officer's face was raked away. Wet, raw muscle shone like b.l.o.o.d.y meat on bone, his right eye bulging from its socket without the benefit of skin to hold it in. She could see behind him into the pa.s.senger's seat. The cop's partner, with b.l.o.o.d.y mouth and hands, had a bullet hole between his eyes and was missing the back of his skull. Brain matter clumped on the inside of the patrol car's window.

The surviving officer stumbled toward her. His pistol was still in his right hand and he took lurching steps. His left arm cradled his stomach as if he were going to vomit.

”Help,” he gasped. His half-face stark with fear and disbelief, he fell forward on top of her.

Dejah screamed as the full force of his weight crashed against her. He knocked her against a maroon Toyota Camry; she tumbled, his dead weight pressing her to the ground. He groaned a final breath. Dejah pushed him off and tried to stand, but her foot slipped under the closest car, her pant leg snagging on the metal frame. She yanked. Her pants ripped, but she still wasn't free. ”d.a.m.n it!”

She heard stirring nearby. Something was moving amongst the wreckage and automobiles. Glancing up, she saw the gaunt figure of a whiskery man in a flannel s.h.i.+rt standing thirty feet away, looking at her. As soon as Dejah spotted him, a squat woman in a blue dress and disheveled hair zeroed in on her and shuffled nearer. A third figure cropped up: a woman in a business suit who was so stunningly beautiful that even with the sallow indication of the infection, she could've been a model. Except, perhaps, for her fully bloodshot, rheumy eyes.

Dejah, still yanking on her trapped leg, noted a total of six infected people watching her now. Her pulse increased, breath coming shallow in her lungs.

”f.u.c.k!” she yelled. Adrenalin gave her the last burst of energy she needed to shred the cuff of her pant leg and pull her leg free. She stood, grabbing the gun from the dead officer's hand. His fingers were stiff as she unwound them, cringing.

Pistol in hand, Dejah verified it was loaded, and then c.o.c.ked it, swinging it in a semi-circle at the six - no, now it was seven figures, some of them lumbering toward her.

”Stop,” she said. ”Y'all stop right there. Don't come any closer or I'll blow your f.u.c.king heads off!”

They didn't register comprehension of her command. They came for her. Some climbed over the hoods of cars. The man with the beard and flannel s.h.i.+rt was closest. Her heart rate was through the roof, and nothing in her could confirm this was anything but the right thing to do, but her brain screamed no as she pulled the trigger.

The gun recoiled with the shot.

The man kept coming.

She'd missed.

She aimed again and was about to take a second shot when she felt a tight grip around her ankle and the biting gnash of teeth ripped the meat of her calf. Dejah screamed, looking down. The cop had come-to, hungry for her flesh.

She aimed at him, firing into his body. He convulsed, but didn't stop his attack, and tightened the grip on her leg. She twisted away, blood gus.h.i.+ng from her wound, pain screaming at her nerves.

Dejah fired again and again ... and then the bolt locked into an open position on an empty chamber.

No more bullets.

Using the gun as a hammer, she beat the cop's skull. His head recoiled with each impact. She broke the skin, blood seeping out. She kept hammering until the skin was a mashed ruin and the front of the skull cracked like a wooden egg. It began to give. Only when she'd frantically created an oozing, caved-in hole running thick with brain fluid and brackish blood did the dead cop release her.

By then, the others were close. Too close.

She bolted, lunging over vehicles, heedless of direction, concerned only with escape.

The infected people chased Dejah Corliss across eight wreckage-filled lanes of Interstate 20, but she didn't have enough of a lead. Two stray cars on the shoulder of the road blocked her path. Black fingernails caught in her billowing s.h.i.+rt and yanked. A second pair of hands joined the first and they pulled her to the ground on her side. A small carnivorous mob leapt upon her. Teeth ripped her flesh. They chewed away at her calf and her left forearm. Bites tore the backs of her legs and deep into her side in a maddening cannibalistic frenzy. Muscle ripped. Blood pumped from her wounds. Pain seared through her being.

Dejah curled her hand into a claw and swiped the nearest cheek. Her nails raked away loose skin like membrane from rotting pulp. Half of an attacker's face came off in her hand, but he came at her again, now a leering skull with chomping jaws.

Two more joined the madness. She swung a sharp-toed boot up to crack a skull, and shoved out with both legs to kick away two more. In a sheer berserker rage that would've made her Nordic ancestors proud, she beat off the remaining few, scrabbled from the dirty road onto her mangled knees, and, blood pouring from her fading body, escaped. In their bloodl.u.s.t, the creatures fell upon each other like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

She made it some distance along the road and headed down an embankment. Gravel rolled beneath her feet and she lost her balance. The infected gave chase. Most of them fell, but two of them Mr. Whiskers and Fas.h.i.+on Model - came down full speed, bounding through the air with blood-slick grins.

Dejah forced herself to her feet. Her eyes scanned the terrain along the interstate and up and down Beltline Road. At the bottom of the hill was a drainage ditch. She spotted the culvert opening and ran for it.

Reaching the entrance, she crawled inside. The light from the outside grew further away as she worked her way further into the tunnel. She found a concrete shelf near an intersection of tunnels where, alone at last, she curled up in the pitch darkness.

Dejah's breath came in shallow gasps. Blood poured from her wounds and she could hear the stream against the concrete. Oh, Selah. Please G.o.d, please protect my baby. Blurry thoughts of Selah mingled with the fleeting knowledge that her life was draining from her.

I just want to see my baby.

Unconsciousness took her.

Thirty minutes later, she died.

CHAPTER 10.

Later that night, she came back to life.

It was like almost drowning. Like coming up gasping for air, lungs near bursting, head pounding. She coughed violently. Her vision was cloudy but began to clear. As she blinked away the fog, her first thoughts were of the birth of her daughter. Then it dawned on her that, somehow, she herself had just been born all over again in the darkness of a drainage tunnel.

Besides the healing ache of recently shredded flesh and fractured bones, there was a persistent longing inside of her. It wasn't a good sensation. She did a mental check of her faculties and touched her limbs, moved her joints around the way an arthritic old woman does in the morning to get things moving. Hands pressing over her flesh, she couldn't find the raw, chewed places that were there when she ... died.

Maybe I just fell asleep.