Hissers II: Death March (7 page)

Connor raised his gun, cocked the hammer, aimed it at the car door. Inside, the hisser struggled to get out but for some reason couldn’t get the door open. Its roar of hunger came through the car loud and clear as it struggled for freedom.

“Must have broken the handle inside,” Olive said, shaking. “Or it’s a power lock.”

“
Or he forgot how to open a door. Let’s just shoot him.” He pressed closer.

“No, don’t shoot it,” Olive said, catching her breath. “Not yet. You’ll put a hole in the window. We’ll need the window.”

“I’m thinking we find another car then.”

“No. This one is the fastest around. Let’s
open it up, check the gas gauge first, see if the keys are in there…or on that thing.”

“You want to let it out?”

“Don’t give it a chance to get out. I’ll open the door and you shoot it. Can you do that?”

Connor remembered the two zombies he
’d shot on the side of the road back in Castor, the first two he’d encountered after grabbing General Davis’s gun. He remembered the cold feeling that had washed over him when he saw their heads split open. He’d done it a thousand times in video games but doing it that night in real life had changed him. He’d come to terms with death and survival, and with the fact these things weren’t human. It wasn’t until he’d emptied the gun into more hissers at the plane that he’d let the feeling of murder, for want of a better term, settle into his bones. Okay, it wasn’t murder per se, but it was ending something’s life, even if that thing was borne from hell. “Yeah, I can do that. Just like Halo.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing. Just a game. Something Seth and I used to play.” He raised the gun in front of him, parted his legs to get a good stance. “I’m ready.”

“Okay,
on three.” She grabbed the door handle, gave him a nod. The hisser slammed its head against the window again, leaving a smear of blood on the inside. “Be quick, and don’t shoot the steering column. Ready? One…two…three!”

She pulled the door open. The hisser
leapt out with the force of a charging bull, throwing the door wide and knocking Olive to the ground where she lost hold of her weapon. Connor took the shot, saw the hisser’s face explode in a red blossom as its body slammed into him, taking him to the ground under its weight. Its mangled head snapped forward and head butted him, erupting stars behind his eyes.

“Connor! Get up!” Olive shouted. “Get up now!”

With aching limbs, Connor rolled the dead hisser off him, stood up only to see two small children, little girls no older than eight or nine, racing out of the back of the Charger. Both wore matching pink dresses with sparrows on them, bows in their hair. The first was on Olive before she could grab her gun. The second came right at Connor.

“Twins,” he muttered
. The small girl roared and leapt at him. He swung his gun at her and hit her in the face, knocked her sideways. As she righted herself, he fired. The small dead girl’s head snapped back, the back of her skull clacking to the road, one eye falling out onto her chest. She landed on her back and lay still.

“Bitch!” Olive yelled, desperately trying to keep her attacker’s fingernails from getting her eyes. She kicked out
and sent the little girl backwards into the car. With a sweep of her legs, she pulled her gun toward her, snatched it up and fired. The bullet passed through the girl’s neck and into the car’s seat. She fired again, this time blasting a hole in the girl’s nose. The body dropped in a heap and went still.

“You gotta get the brain,” Connor said, offering a hand to help her up. She took it, brushed hersel
f off when she was upright.

“I can see that,” she said. “Now I know why I never had kids.” She used her foot to shove the dead girl aside
and took a deep breath.

“You okay?” Connor asked.

“Didn’t think I’d be shooting kids is all. Oh man, I don’t want to do that again.” She looked inside the Charger. “Keys are in the ignition, tank is half full. That’s good.”

“Guy must have gotten bit in the car somehow,” Connor offered. “Or got bit and jumped in the car with his kids before he turned.”

“Look here. The backseat is torn through. I think one of them things got into the trunk somehow, clawed its way into the backseat.”

Connor moved to the car’s trunk, saw tha
t indeed it was not fully shut. He raised his gun, backed up, and used his foot to kick it open. It was empty. “Came back out the way it went in, I guess,” he said. But where was it now, he wondered. Where were any of the things that had attacked the people in this caravan.

“Fucker had a bottle of Jack in here,” Olive said, holding up the liquor. “It’s still full. He may not have been Dad of the Year but I’m liking him now.” She undid the cap and took a long swig. “Oh God, that’s good. You want some.”

“I don’t really drink.”

“I don’t think the laws apply anymore, kid. But
it’s your choice. I’m certainly not going to corrupt a minor. It’s an acquired taste anyway.”

“I tried it once. Not long again fact. I don’t get why people drink it. It doesn’t even taste good.”

“People don’t drink it for the taste of the liquor, Connor. They drink it because it tastes better than the sewage that is their life. C’mon, throw the supplies in here and let’s get going. The sun is going down soon. We’re going to need to find shelter and maybe see if we can find a way to get news on what’s happening.”

“How are we going to do that? There’s no Internet, no cellphones, nothing.”

“There’s no electronics, true, but there’s still campfires, and people tell stories around campfires. And all the people from these cars can’t be dead. Some of them must have gotten away, which means they’re around here somewhere. All we have to do is find them, or find wherever people are hiding, and we can get some news. I find it hard to believe every police station and firehouse is empty. People have to be somewhere.”

“But wha
t if there isn’t? What if everyone’s just dead?”

Olive got in the car and started up the engine. It purred to life without a problem. From the passenger seat she grabbed a
Girl Scouts sweatshirt and wiped away the dead man’s blood from the inside of the window, then tossed it on the road. “Then we carry on. Because I know my mom is dead, I’m gonna get to her. And we’re gonna get that drive to your destination. And get in the damn car already because I’m looking in the rearview mirror and I see movement behind us and I don’t think it’s the highway welcoming committee come to ask us to adopt this section.”

Connor turned and saw the mirage in the distance. A wavy line of d
irt being kicked in the air. And in that mirage he saw the clear silhouettes of hundreds of moving limbs attached to bulbous monstrosities. The spider creatures were coming.

He threw his supplies in the back seat of the Charger and jumped in the passenger seat.
It was still covered in blood but at this point he had to assume getting blood on himself superficially wasn’t a method of transmittal. Olive threw the car in gear and eased it out of the traffic jam, being careful not to hit the cars around them. “No use getting bumpers locked,” she said.

Connor picked up the Jack Daniels and stared at the brown
liquid. Just holding it reminded him of Nicole, and that night in the fort, how he’d felt her breath on his mouth after trying the booze. “How long does it take to develop a taste for this?” he asked as Olive got the car free and kicked it into high gear.

She drove on the berm
, moving as fast as she could without causing the car to slide.  “Your parents were killed by undead monsters,” she said. “If you don’t have a taste for it now, you never will.”

TUESDAY, 9:12 PM

The pantry was full of canned food, but none of it looked appealing to Amanita. What she really wanted was a grilled chicken salad, not creamed corn and refried beans. She shut the door and returned to the living room where Doug sat in a beige couch by the front door, a baseball bat in his hand. He was pretending to play it like a guitar.

“Find anything to eat?” he asked.

“No. I mean, there’s a couple Hot Pockets in the freezer, but the freezer is off so they’re pretty much room temperature. We can risk it, I suppose, can cook ’em over a fire. You think they’re full of preservatives and shit?”

“I don’t think making a fire is a good idea. We don’t want to draw attention.”

“I think if no one saw us breaking in here, making all that noise with the back door, then there probably aren’t any people around. At least not anyone who cares.”

“You could be right. Then again, maybe people are just holed up in the homes ’round here, keeping a low profile. Still, I say no fire.”

Amanita plopped in a recliner opposite the couch. “So then what? We stay here for a while, eat bugs?”

“Funny.”

“I don’t think it’s safe. I’ve been trapped in a house when those things broke in. Doors and windows don’t stop them, they just break through. And then you’re kind of trapped.”

“We’ll leave in the morning, find someplace better, see if we can meet up with the army. They’ve got to have
safety zones set up somewhere.”

“I dunno. This place is like a ghost town.
I haven’t even seen signs of a firefight let alone any military cars.” She drew her knees up to her chest and hung her head, breathed heavily to calm her nerves.

“How you doing?” Doug asked.

“Fucking dandy.”

“I’m sorry again about your parents.”

“I know. You already told me. Doesn’t bring them back, though.”

Doug sneaked a peek out the curtains to the street. He turned back to Amanita. “I lost people too, you know. My best friends. All of ’em just killed before me. It was messed up, I tell ya.”

“Them hissing dead things got them?”

“Yeah. We were gigging when it happened
, at The Calendar Bar.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s north of Liptonville. Small little joint, but they have some great whiskey. We were halfway through a version of Walk the Line—”

“Is that a song?”

“Is that a song? You’re kidding me. Only the best Johnny Cash song ever written.”

Amanita shook her head. “Still not entirely sure who that is? I mean, I’ve heard th
e name and all. Wasn’t there a movie or something.”

“You’re cutting me deep, Am. Johnny Cash is the o
nly musician you ever need know. He is American music personified.”

“Says you.”

“Then tell me, Am, who do you like to listen to?”

“Um. I like the Booya Brothers for hip hop. Or, um, I really like The Parasite Phantoms. They’re a punk band.”

“Girl, there hasn’t been a real punk band since Joe Strummer kicked Mick Jones out of the Clash.”

“Who?”

Doug slapped his hand on his forehead. “Okay, we’re gonna have to set aside some time for Music 101 later, but for now just take it from me we were killing it on Walk the Line when all of a sudden these crazy guys just come running in the front door of the bar and start biting people. And I’m on stage singing, and I’m watching this and thinking a fight has broken out, which isn’t too uncommon at a bar, but then wondering why a fight would break out to a love song, and then I just see blood everywhere. I mean everywhere.

“So w
e stop playing and look at each other, like, what do we do. And I see one of the bartenders get his throat ripped completely out. Blood goes all over the damn place. He falls down and he’s totally still. But then about five seconds later he’s up again and his eyes are just wrong, you know, like kind of yellow. Like dry stones. And he’s snarling and looking right at me. Next thing I know he’s running right for me, jumping over dead people on the ground, marking me for death.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I froze. I just see Kevin’s guitar—Kevin plays lead, kind of like Luther Perkins, and don’t ask me who that is because you’ll just make me cry—his guitar comes out of nowhere and smashes this dead guy’s face in. I see the guy’s nose crush into pulp. Must have jarred the brain, thankfully, because the guy went down and stayed down. But it was too late. More of them were coming. Kevin’s got his Telecaster up again and it’s dripping brain and blood and he swings again and this time I kind of snap out of my trance. I don’t remember a whole lot besides picking up my stage monitor and bringing it down on this chick’s head. She was climbing on stage and clawing for me. I’d been looking at her in the crowd earlier but she had those same yellow eyes now and some dude’s fingers in her mouth. I hit her so hard I saw bits of her brain shoot of of her ears. Our drummer, George, starts throwing his toms and doing his best to keep them things at bay. I saw him stab his drum stick right into some jughead’s eye, right into the brain, but it was too late. He went down under a pile of them things, swinging and kicking and doing damage that would knock out a real person, but not these things. And I look around and there’s Kevin under another pile. Our bass player—I don’t even know his real name—he’s punching and kicking but the dead fucks have got him, pulling him apart in a tug-o-war. Both his arms rip right off at the shoulder. Man, he screamed so loud I thought my ears would bleed.