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  Megan’s expression didn’t change. Jeff tried to collect himself and calm down as he heard the moans getting closer. He took a deep breath and reached out to touch her. Megan shrank away, her expression appalled.

  “All I really want right now is for the two of us to stay alive. We can’t wait around for God, or anyone else for that matter, to show up and save us.” There was a hint of desperation in Jeff’s voice as he pointed behind his back. “And I really don’t want the good folks from the Baptist Fellowship to take us on home to Jesus. So can we get out of here? Now, please?”

  Megan gave him another dark look, her arms crossed as Jeff waited. He looked ready to jump up and push her out of the driver’s seat. The stretch between the church and road was not that big, and many of the stumbling figures had crossed most of it already, their greedy fingers stretching out to clutch at the two survivors.

  “I am sorry, Megan. I really am.” Jeff could feel a tingling in his neck where he had been nearly strangled the day before. At the same time, he was beginning to imagine an army of ghouls smashing through the window and tearing him to pieces.

  Megan shook her head and took hold of the steering wheel. She stamped down on the gas pedal, and the wheels spit up gravel as they caught hold of the road. Jeff was pushed back in his seat, and his contrite expression changed to one of surprise.

  “Why do you have to be such a coldhearted prick?” Megan inquired.

  Jeff swallowed hard. He took a deep breath and let it blow out between his teeth before he spoke.

  “I’m not trying to be. I’m just more concerned about the two human beings inside the minivan than I am about those things outside of it.”

  Megan didn’t look happy with his answer.

  “They’re dead, Megan.” Jeff could feel the anger peeking out again and stuffed it back down inside. He shrugged. “They’re dead, or as good as dead.” Pausing, he lifted his eyes to the roof of the van and searched for something to say. He wasn’t really sure what the infected actually were. Medical science hadn’t offered any plausible explanations when the doctors and scientists were still alive to study the virus. But he didn’t need anyone to tell him what he already knew.

  “They’re dead,” he repeated as he looked over at her, his eyes sad. “They just haven’t figured it out yet.”

  He saw her grip on the steering wheel loosen. Megan was blinking fast, fighting back tears of rage. Seeing that his words were making things worse, not better, Jeff felt the bile of anger boiling up from his gut once again.

  “I’ve mourned enough for a lifetime already. I’ll be damned if I’m going to do it for a bunch of people I didn’t even know.” He crossed his arms and stared out the window.

  “Maybe you will be damned for it.”

  Jeff stiffened at Megan’s indictment. He looked at her and was unable to think of a response. He saw her emotions shift from anger to regret and then sadness. Tears began to roll freely down her face.

  Jeff went back to looking out the window as he thought about what Megan had said. His desire to argue was gone, and all he felt was a cold, hard lump of remorse in the pit of his stomach.

  As he watched the trees roll by, he leaned his face against the window and thought about what he had become. He had no idea who he was anymore.

  Maybe I am damned...maybe we all are.

  Chapter 17

  They rode in silence, each trapped in private misery. Jeff tried to apologize but clammed up when Megan stiffened at the sound of his voice. So he sat, slump-shouldered, as they moved slowly down the rural road.

  Large stretches of the route they took were unpopulated, and a dense canopy of trees stretched to the horizon on both sides of the road. The gaps in the woodlands were filled with modest homes set on large properties, which spread out behind them. They weren’t in farm country yet but were moving farther away from the densely populated suburbs.

  Fifteen minutes passed before Megan finally spoke. “Maybe you should drive,” she said in a stilted voice.

  Jeff looked over at her, confused.

  “I don’t know my way around Gallatin,” she said, her voice losing some of its stiffness.

  “Just stop whenever and we can switch,” he replied in an even tone.

  Megan looked over at him and nodded, her eyes filled with regret. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Jeff gave her a hesitant smile. When she returned a shy one of her own, he felt the tension drain away. Neither of them had found a way to say they were sorry, but at least there was some kind of understanding between them. Things were going to be okay.

  The van slowed to a stop, and the man and woman changed places. As Jeff settled back into the driver’s seat, he spied something glittering in the distance. He looked out the window and squinted in the bright sunshine.

  “What the hell?”

  Megan was still getting situated when she heard him speak and saw him peering through the windshield when she plopped into her chair. Jeff’s eyes widened, and she squinted to try to catch a glimpse of what he was looking at. After a few moments, she spotted it.

  There were human shapes in the distance. Megan blinked and rubbed at her eyes. Despite her best efforts to focus, the figures were not clear. All she could tell was that they were coming up over a hill perhaps a quarter of a mile down the road.

  “They must have heard the engine,” Megan said.

  Jeff nodded absently as he continued to track the shapes moving closer. Megan noticed something else out of the corner of her eye: more movement. The rearview mirror was angled away from her, so she moved it. There they were, behind them.

  “It looks like the gang’s all here.”

  Jeff glanced over at Megan and then turned to look out the back window. There were three, possibly four more shapes behind them, and there was no doubt as to what they were. They were closer to them than the others.

  He shifted the van into gear, and they began rolling forward. “I’d rather deal with the ones in front of us than the ones behind.”

  Pressing down gently on the gas, Jeff elevated their speed to twenty as they moved closer to the people up ahead. The sunlight was directly behind the little group, and it was still hard to tell exactly what they were.

  Megan gasped when she saw one waving, its arm swinging back and forth to hail them.

  Jeff slowed the van. He had seen the movement as well. Megan squealed in excitement and clapped her hands, obviously assuming the little group before them was uninfected. He wasn’t quite so sure.

  As they inched closer, he saw that there were three of them and they were all wearing military uniforms. Jeff’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, noticing one had a rifle slung over his shoulder.

  Megan turned to Jeff, her smile widening, and punched him playfully on the arm. He ignored her and kept watch over the trio. Pressing gently on the brakes, he stopped the van in the middle of the road and watched the group’s slow progress.

  “Well, don’t stop now!” Megan chastised Jeff. “We’re almost to them.” She giggled. “And to think, we were this close to a military outpost the whole time!” She bounced in her seat in excitement.

  When Jeff didn’t move forward again, she gave an exasperated growl and leaned over to open her door. His response was instantaneous. He grabbed her by the arm and pointed at the men.

  “What?” Megan shrugged out of Jeff’s grasp and gave him an irritated look. He glared back in response and jabbed his finger out the windshield for emphasis.

  “Would you just take another look?” he chastised her.

  She ignored the request and gave him her most withering glance. When Jeff didn’t back down, Megan sighed. Rolling her eyes, she slowly looked back out the windshield, making it clear she was only doing so to get him off her back.

  The soldiers had gotten much closer. Megan’s jaw quivered, and she felt faint.

  They were definitely soldiers. More accurately, they had been soldiers, but now were just another group of plague victims. One wa
s still waving at them, and it looked like he was signaling their van to pull over. Jeff studied him carefully. The private had apparently been attacked with his sidearm in his hand, and there it remained. Swollen fingers were sealed on the weapon, the skin cracked and dripping dark pus as his hand waved back and forth in front of him. He was dragging a mangled leg behind, forcing his arm to rise up to maintain balance. Jeff breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that the semiautomatic’s slide was back. The weapon was empty.

  The other two soldiers had an assortment of bruises, wounds, and ragged tears to their flesh. One was missing his lower jaw, and the gaping hole down his tattered throat pulsated and bubbled. The other had an M16 hanging limply over an arm that was sliced in half. Rubbery-looking gristle dangled from the wound, the remains of muscle and tissue from his absent forearm.

  They began moving again and swerved around the threesome. Megan remained silent. Jeff could see the look of stunned fatigue on her face and searched for something comforting to say to her but could think of nothing. It looked like she had been beaten into submission, and he hated that look. It filled him with despair. Even when she was angry with him, it was better than this.

  He picked up speed as they moved over the hill. They passed an intersection with a dead traffic light above and an overturned Humvee off to the side. Jeff glanced at it wistfully but kept moving. There were too many places nearby for the infected to be hiding to risk getting out and checking for weapons or supplies.

  The road beyond the overturned military vehicle was clear for the most part, and they saw houses up ahead. The van rolled slowly on, and Jeff kept his eyes peeled.

  The road curved to the north. He could see a clog of cars ahead and knew they were almost to Gallatin. It was not as bad as it had been in Milfield, but it was clear that people had been trying to escape this area as well. Most of the cars were facing the opposite direction with only a handful heading toward town.

  Jeff slowed to a stop as they hit another intersection. It was a mess of cracked-up cars and torn and twisted bodies—bodies that noticed the van and moved slowly toward it. Several shapes detached themselves from their resting places between vehicles and from the small, demolished businesses on both sides of the road.

  It was a wide intersection, a major exchange. Jeff and Megan both glanced at the supermarket that took up a huge plot of land across the road. Despite the damage to the building, it looked newly renovated. A shiny sign out front advertised it as a mega-mart, one of those combination grocery and everything else type of places. Any thoughts of trying to raid the massive superstore fled as Jeff scanned the parking lot. He spied two Humvees with SAWs mounted on top, just like the one back in Milfield. Their doors were open, and at least one shredded body lay nearby along with an array of military hardware that had been discarded and forgotten. They were positioned near the entrance of the store, and several Jersey barriers were set up next to them. They looked exactly like the concrete barriers used in highway construction.

  There was a large group of infected milling about the parking lot, looking into abandoned cars and clutching shopping carts. For the most part, they had not noticed the minivan yet. Jeff looked closer and spotted even more squirming bodies behind the shattered front window of the store. There were several bright placards torn and dangling from the broken glass, announcing specials on ground chuck and gallons of milk.

  “It doesn’t look like Gallatin fared any better than Milfield,” he said with a dismissive grunt as he pulled into the intersection.

  There was a clear path on the road, and Jeff knew the National Guard must have created it so traffic would continue to flow despite every citizen’s impulse to turn the thoroughfare into a giant parking lot. It was tricky navigating past the dead cars and military vehicles, and he was forced to pull into the grass on the side of the road to get around several clusters of more overturned and smashed Humvees.

  Blood-soaked signs with hastily scrawled messages were tacked to several telephone poles. They all read the same: “Civilian vehicles must go north or south! Please do not abandon your vehicle on Route 28: it will be removed from the roadway. Personal items are subject to inspection and confiscation. NO civilians are allowed to carry firearms or explosives beyond this point. Violators will be shot!”

  It appeared as if several makeshift checkpoints had been set up and then smashed and trampled. Jeff and Megan looked out at the wasteland around them, fighting back nausea at seeing the remains of countless dead soldiers and civilians. They were impossible to miss, because they were everywhere. Thick clouds of circling flies blackened the air above the corpses.

  Not only was there a wide array of severed body parts spread across the pavement and grass, there was a slew of weapons as well. Jeff saw rifles, sidearms, grenade launchers, and even a few flamethrowers. Scorch marks on the roadway and vehicles hinted at the massive battle that must have taken place in the area. Night vision goggles, shattered and useless, were also strewn about.

  Thousands of spent cartridges surrounded several heavy machine gun emplacements. They had been spit out at a tremendously high rate of speed and bounced off concrete barriers that had been set up in a feeble attempt to block the advance of what must have been a horde of the infected. They could hear the sound of countless hollow metal shells being crushed beneath the van’s tires as they rolled on. All the weapons, the belt-fed machine guns and the fifty-caliber M-2s, along with the grenade launchers, M16s and M4s, had fallen to the ground. Tripods and other mounting devices were smashed and broken. Jeff wondered how many useable weapons were still lying around, and he felt the itch of desire to stop and snatch something up once again. The temptation passed as he saw a group of rotters congregating nearby. They were stumbling around clusters of military equipment, and he spied several shadows moving on both sides of the road, back near the buildings and behind them.

  Without warning, several ghouls popped up in front of them, jack-in-the-box fashion. It was almost as if they had magically appeared in front of the van, banging, moaning, and trying to climb on the hood as Jeff hit the brakes. Megan burst out with a high-pitched squeal, and Jeff shouted “Jesus Christ!” as the monsters slavered and slouched toward them.

  Megan shoved herself backwards in her seat, her hands pressed against the dash. “Go around. Go around. GO AROUND!” she repeated as she pulled her legs up underneath her chin.

  “SHUT UP AND LET ME THINK!” Jeff screamed.

  Megan chirped one last time and then fell silent, turning her full concentration toward scrunching into the tightest ball possible. Jeff gripped the steering wheel, looking frantically out at the front of the van. For the moment, the five or so stiffened figures pounding on the hood were their only immediate threat. More were coming from all directions, but were farther back.

  Two of the five wore flak vests with the digital patterned camouflage that had become the standard with the military over the past few years. Another was in a MOPP, or chem suit, that had been ripped open, exposing a shattered ribcage. The mask had also been torn off and dangled freely from its neck. The monster’s exposed face was free of flesh and gave Jeff a skeletal grin. The other two appeared to be civilians. None was in great shape, their clothing shredded and their flesh cracked and burnt from endless days exposed to the summer sun. But even in their present condition, Jeff knew they could make some serious dents in the van if he allowed them to keep whaling on it.

  There was no room to turn around. Not much possibility of driving past them either. More were coming and closing rapidly. He flipped the van in reverse and hit the gas.

  Megan popped her head up from behind her knees, and her eyes went wide as she felt the van moving backwards.

  “Wha-what are you doing?” The panic in her voice rose as she repeated the question. “NO NO NO! We can’t go back!” She reached for the wheel, and Jeff swatted her hand away with a stinging slap. She pulled back and held her hand close to her chest as she gave him a horrified look, pain and terror battling
for supremacy on her face.

  “I’m just giving us some room to maneuver,” he said, fighting to keep the wheel straight. The loud thump startled them both, and the bounce, like they had hit a large speed bump, sent the minivan careening out of control. Jeff’s head slammed into the headrest as they came to a stop against one of the Humvees that lined the street. He quickly recovered and looked out the back window of the Odyssey.

  The rear window was splattered with a trail of something dark and viscous. It dripped from the point of impact, where a piece of something still quivered like a blob of coagulated chocolate pudding. After a couple seconds, it left a snail trail as it slid to the ground. Jeff thought he had seen a tooth in it. He flipped the car into drive and heard moaning coming from below the vehicle.

  “I guess you didn’t finish it off.” The sudden jolt of hitting the Humvee had allowed Megan to regain some of her senses. Her arms were crossed as she chided Jeff.

  He smiled and began to accelerate. “Got it covered.” The next thump had a more sickly sound to it when they ran over the body again. Megan shivered involuntarily as a wet, greasy popping noise completed the effect. The revulsion was short-lived, and she focused on the group in front of them. They were closing on the minivan.

  “Brace yourself.”

  Megan gripped the edge of the dashboard with both hands as Jeff floored it, heading straight toward the wall of flesh in front of them. The impact was surprisingly quiet. The rotters were spread out, and Jeff managed to avoid one, nick two, and only plow head-on into the final three. One was so ripe and bloated that it exploded like a balloon, spreading its insides over the front of the vehicle.

  Megan watched the ghastly pseudo-human disintegrate, eyes bugged out. The head must have been mush to begin with, because it did not sound or look like any bones shattered on impact. It was a piñata with eyes, but instead of candy, it was filled with a brackish jelly that ran in thick ropes down the window. Megan tried to bend over, to get some blood to her head. She felt dizzy and nauseated. Her seatbelt locked, forcing her to stay upright. Acid splashed up from her stomach and caught in her throat, bits of the chips she had eaten that morning revisiting her mouth.